I think we’re well past people becoming apathetic to privacy concerns. Either they’re ignorant or they prefer the advantages.
You, along with everyone else sharing this soapbox, aren’t convincing anyone that their data privacy is a concern. Your example about using private communications against someone is becoming increasingly valid but the vast majority of people are going to ignore this until it’s too late. Maybe not even then.
If you haven’t heard about human beings before, they’re a species that rarely shows concern for their immediate future (never mind long term). If and when they do, they point at and blame the people whom they’ve elected to ensure pending catastrophic events don’t impede upon their freedom to be stupid.
Our reality is the frog in the pot of water. Things are happening at such a slow pace that we accept the incremental changes despite their known ramifications. Before you know it, the water is at a rolling boil but we’ve already subscribed to boil-proof clothing so we can enjoy the pleasure of the sauna.
Apple released a more user friendly version of this in 2021 https://www.apple.com/privacy/docs/A_Day_in_the_Life_of_Your_Data.pdf
I think it’s safe to say that, at this point, most people know that their information is being sucked up. But very few care at all. Some of the people I’ve spoken with are actually in favor of being tracked because they find it beneficial and they want better ads. I don’t know if this is a real desire for them or if they’ve been brainwashed.
The chance of your personal data being used against you is increasing every day. Leaks are happening all the time; largely from databases presumed to be more secure than an app on your phone. Still, relatively few people are really affected by this.
Please tell me otherwise but it seems that the worst thing the data collecting raised in this post could do is manipulate an algorithm to show you ads or social media content or other website content (most concerning, political propaganda).
That’s to say, okay - this is weird but you have to tell people why they should care if you want them to raise concern. WHY is this “terrifying”? I mean, I can speculate but even the worst case scenarios I’ve told people about have barely raise an eyebrow.
This seems plausible so I tried other browsers and computers on my network.
Edge, Firefox, Brave, Arc, and DuckDuckGo all showed the same page on Ebay with “Trending in Sneakers” and “Trending in Watches”. I was searching for sneakers recently but not watches.
Orion is the only one that showed “Your Recently Viewed Items” with specific items I was looking at in Safari. I went ahead and chose “Reset Orion” from the menu and see it’s now operating the same as the other browsers.
The statement reads well, and I’ll take them at their word, but if an algorithm exists to show you “relevant” content, they’re collecting data and using it keep you on the platform.
This has been my issue with ‘social media’ for the past ten(?) years. As soon as Instagram switch the default from chronological to what it thinks you want to see, it’s continued to be more and more shitified (so much that I no longer use it).
The beauty of the early days of social media was that it was real-time. I could see who was doing what right now. I could see what establishments were hosting events tonight. Instead, these platforms decided it was more to their benefit to show posts it thinks will keep you on the platform longer - to show you more ads. For me, this lead to finding out days later that things have happened I would have like to have done.
Wall Street run Social Media is garbage. Businesses, organizations, governments, etc., need to go back to publishing content on their own websites (or the Fediverse) and enabling RSS feeds.
Rich people don’t care about their privacy as much as they have their own IT department to do the work for them (source: I’ve been their IT department).
Their devices are just as secure as you would imagine any high profile CEO. Their home networks can cost up to $100k and are super secure with constant monitoring. They all have “normal” devices but they’ll usually have a VPN tunnel.
But, stuff like their Facebook logins, etc they’re still pretty bad with passwords, from my experience. I’d say less than percent of the people I’ve worked with have q