subignition
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So is it willful ignorance on your part then? Or have you some explanation for not paying attention to the myriad avenues of data collection and exploitation for the last fifteen years?
To use a very old example which pales in comparison to things which are possible now, here’s a story from 2012 wherein Target’s marketing efforts outed a pregnant teenager to her family with targeted coupons. Luckily her family was supportive in this case, however it’s not hard to imagine real harm being done if the circumstances were different.
“[…] we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on, she’ll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don’t spook her, it works.”
So to bring this to a slightly more relevant topic for 2023: are you really okay with mass surveillance being used to uncover and prosecute women who have been forced to travel out of states with abortion bans to seek lifesaving medical care? Just because you don’t have to worry about it personally?
This is just one of many, many examples of the abuse of data collection in the modern day. Before you try and discard this post as an alleged strawman (or some shit) I encourage you to actually open your eyes and look, because these entities are not nameless, many of them are household names. Your “spooky bedtime stories” argument is an absolute farce and I honestly would prefer you to be trolling than genuinely this ignorant.
Pardon me for sounding like an armchair psychologist here, but it seems to me like you have fallen down some weird rabbit hole where you are excusing your creepy behavior patterns with this concept of privacy. I suggest you take an honest look at how you behaved in this interaction, because “privacy loving” is neither a cause or justification for what you described doing in the OP.
Instagram and Snapchat play a vital role in the dating, no one is willing to share their # anymore. If you say you don’t have Insta or Snap all you’ll get is a weird up to down stare and the words “I’m sorry”.
If you really believe that, then tough shit: you can’t have your cake and eat it too. You chose to stay off insta and snap, so you have to accept the consequences of that choice. Your decision to try to spin up a burner account and hastily attempt to make it look legitimate was stalker-tier behavior. Not to mention that painting a whole class of people with such a broad brush as “no one is willing to share their number anymore” is dangerously close to incel bullshit all on its own. It is far more likely that no one is willing to share their number with you because you are pushing to get too familiar too quickly and they are rightly picking up on the major red flags.
The appropriate response would have been to be honest about not using it (and in general being honest is ALWAYS THE RIGHT MOVE when you’re meeting people, so long as sharing wouldn’t put your safety at undue risk), and to accept the odds of the weird stare you expect to get.
Because everyone is a unique person, and you don’t actually know when you’re going to run into someone with similar views as you about privacy, if that is really your true concern. But it seems like your desperation overrode whatever principles you purport to have in that moment. Changing who you are to try and get in someone’s good books is fundamentally manipulative and is a serious problem. You are never going to be capable of a healthy relationship until you nip that in the bud.
It sounds like you are young, so the good news is that most people have been a fucking idiot in this regard at one point or another, and it’s easily fixed! Accept that you fucked this up and take an honest look at how you approach interaction with others, and you will already be farther along the path to normal social relations than you think.
What a detailed post, that was a fun read. You clearly live a much more interesting life than some of us