I’m not cynical, overall I think everything will be fine and will continue advocate for privacy. But all the effort towards privacy seems like kind of Sisyphus myth. I don’t really gain anything by being privacy conscious, I just regain part of what people used to have before internet. Best case scenario is that I don’t exist in eyes of big corps. This just adds to today’s complexity which requires constant effort, just so that things wouldn’t be taken from me.
Best case scenario is that I don’t exist in eyes of big corps.
Actually best case scenario is that they just lump you in with other people who try to get privacy or block ads, because it’s such a miniscule number of people who do it, it’s actually more likely that they can profile you based on your habits of trying to regain privacy.
It’s a vicious cycle, the more you do to try to make yourself anonymous, the more you’re actually just putting yourself in corporations “privacy conscious consumers” box and they’re just waiting for the right products to shill at you. (“I feel like I’m caught in a web!”)
It’s actually part of the reason you see more “privacy respecting services” popping up, with lots of questions about how much they actually respect privacy. Privacy, like everything else, is now a product to be sold.
Also, you don’t actually want to not exist in the eyes of big corps. If you’re stuck using one of their services and you’ve been memory-holed in some way, getting help to solve your issue (your Google account being banned for no reason, your Uber Driver account never given any riders to pick up, and so on.) is nearly fucking impossible. These companies don’t have human customer service anymore, and trying to climb out of a “digital black hole” is a fucking Kafkaesque nightmare.