Mostly paraphrased, I don’t remember exactly how it was worded. Also the non-quote responses were made up after the fact for this post, this wasn’t a single conversation in this order:

“You’ll miss out on so many events and social opportunities because you don’t have any ‘real’ social media.”

As an introvert, I don’t care.

“You’re selfish for putting your silly notions of ‘privacy’ over being in the loop with what your friends are doing. One day you’ll realize that being there when your friends post about their life events is more important.”

Said by someone who I never considered my friend in the first place. My actual friends have ways of reaching me other than Facebook or WhatsApp.

“Most people aren’t going to bother figuring out which obsecure ‘privacy oriented’ service you decide to use, they’re just not going to talk to you if you’re not on mainstream apps. Normal people value their time more than they value privacy.”

Please stop talking to me then, so I stop wasting your time.

“This isn’t the 1950s anymore. You need to get with the times and embrace the information age.”

I know how to program, you don’t. I know how the protocols that power the internet work, you think it’s a literal magic cloud. I run my own server at home with hardware I bought, you have to pay for Google Drive every month. I’m the one embracing the information age, you’re just blindly using it.

“Geez, you’re like an Amish person! Don’t you see you’ve fallen into a cult? Just instead of not using electricity you don’t use social media.”

No I’m not. See above, I fully embrace technology. In fact, I embrace it so much I’ve spent most of my life figuring out how it works and only use things I understand and control, and I choose not to use certain conveniences because I know how they work. Also, I’m not an antivaxxer or against modern medicine. I also think raising horses in captivity to be your slave is cruel and barbaric. Finally, I don’t believe in God and don’t try to live my life according to a 2000+ year old book. Privacy isn’t a cult, if anything, your blind faith in trillion dollar tech companies is more like the Amish’s blind faith to their God.

“They already have my information anyway.”

“Oh, what are they gonna do with my info? Who cares that I searched for X and Y? LOL.”

Me, a software engineer working for a major cSaaS provider that partners with other companies that specialise in Mobile Real User Monitoring, Open Telemetry, Bluetooth beacons, etc.: “Eh, no idea what they do with that info. Now let me just ignore all these non-anonymized analytics, spans, traces, and metrics that these companies capture about your devices and the health of their applications and infrastructure.”

I stopped bringing these things up years ago. Can’t explain this to persons who don’t care or are not remotely close to being tech savvy. Let them be content and enjoy the things they enjoy.

They give us service for free, they should use our data as they like

that advertisement becomes more relevant and they don’t need to search for things they may like

🤷

https://blog.rebeltechalliance.org/common-objections-debunked/

A (otherwise educated and pretty smart) friend once said to me that she is okay with Google knowing everything since she expects that everybody can profit from the generated knowledge.