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"Privacy" as a concept is for the most part the virtue signal of the tech world. Most people who are super vocal about privacy don't actually care about privacy, they just use it as an ideology to set themselves apart in some sort of way that they perceive to be virtuous.

The two areas that privacy is mentioned in is in what companies government ought to do (and legislation surrounding it) , and what constitutes privacy.

For the former, there are some merits to having legislation around privacy that aren't a virtue signal - for example, you don't want insurance companies having direct info of your private life to raise rates on you in somewhat broken medical system based on statistical risks that you may not exhibit, so you probably want some legislation around companies handling PII data and not selling it, even if this is not a final or a complete solution. However, the discussions around this are usually never about this - most people concerned about privacy have very little no idea of the legislation that is already in place, and there are some pretty strong ones already in US, and even stronger ones in EU). Most of the concern is about just companies not collecting data in the first place, without understanding what that actually means.

For the latter, going off the last sentence, most people don't actually understand (or more charitably think about) what privacy actually means. For example, if you use any Apple products, you don't have privacy. You can traffic capture any Apple device and see how many times it phones home. This is not privacy. Oh you trust Apple not to sell data or use it for any nefarious means? Well I trust FB and Google and any advertisers that they have been in contact with not to do the same. So realistically we both draw some line of privacy, where things that require private data but are super convenient we accept as ok, while things that we don't really care about that much are not worth it for privacy.

So no, I personally dgaf about "privacy" as you talk about it. There is enough legislation to protect data that actually matters against misuse, and as technology evolved, there has never been any indication that anything there is broken.




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