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I'm currently working as a cybersecurity engineer and I'm a former Google SRE. So, I request you do not kneejerk dismiss me as some kind of technical ignoramus if you think that's what my argument hinges on.
Whenever privacy warriors complain about privacy I find myself rolling my eyes and thinking okay boomer. Even though more people than boomers say this and I do believe privacy is important. To be clear I mean privacy in the abstract. "I don't use Facebook because [privacy]". "I am looking to adopt a GrapheneOS based phone with no Google apps because [privacy]".
Privacy is obviously important. I don't want some rando, or worse, some personal enemy to rifle through my all of my digital data looking for ways to harm me. But the abstract privacy concern takes the form of a Motte and Bailey between the two. Google, Facebook and friends mostly act on your private data in the aggregate, but the privacy advocates generate worry that your intimate conversations or pictures are being personally viewed.
I also find privacy warrior claims rather, lets say, Joker-level anarchistic about rule of law. Everyone should have end-to-end encrypted messaging and the government should be locked out of private spaces no matter what. In no other domain do we accept a claim like "this dungeon in my house is off limits even to detectives with a court order because it is my private property" but apparently yes this digital cache of self-produced child pornography or evidence of a ticking time bomb terrorist plot[1] is something we can take to our graves regardless of any legitimate pursuit of justice. The level of hostility towards government here surpasses any of government's responsibility to protect its citizenry.
I'm not arguing against having digital security. It's very important for both organizations and individuals to have basic opsec lined up, especially because of how many automated and directed attacks there are trying to steal money and secrets. But in this battle companies like Google, who privacy advocates possibly fear only less than Facebook, are far closer to friend than foe because they provide a level of sophisticated and free security and direct privacy guarantee that almost nobody can achieve on their own.
The level of fear and worry privacy warriors generate rises to the level of conspiracy-adjacence. The word "qanon" pops into my head. Someone, Out There, is collecting all of your private information and you need to disconnect from the grid right now. Abandon all petty conveniences like being able to share photos with grandma, your life depends on it.
Ironically, the self-hosted Trust No One approach appears to make people even more vulnerable to attack. Even very technically sophisticated friends of mine who have hosted their own email have been hacked and their identities stolen (and used against them for extortion) in ways that would not have happened if they had stuck to GMail and used their FIDO2 two factor key for second factor.
I have another friend who decided to take his family's photos and files out of iCloud and Google Drive. He set up a home RAID array and was cruising along fine but neglected to monitor the drives. One failed and he didn't know, so when the second failed all of his data was gone. He didn't have backups, because why would you if you have RAID and snapshotting. He's not some noob either. He is also a sophisticated technology professional.
My argument against individual actions you can take on privacy are something like: you can do a few basic things to radically improve your personal opsec, and anything else is rapidly diminishing returns at increasingly greater inconvenience and, worse, may be a net increase in your vulnerability to attack or data loss.
My argument against regulatory action on this is, well: Europe leads the way on this. Does anyone think, say, GDPR has made Europeans much safer than Americans? At what regulatory and compliance cost? Mostly GDPR seems like a joke.
The fact that privacy fretting appears to primarily afflict men (with notable exceptions like Naomi Brockwell) suggests that there must be something autistic about it.
(Mostly, I can't shake the strange feeling that inside of all of this is a The Last Psychiatrist style phenomena (made with impeccable erudition that I could never live up to) that privacy worries are a proxy for dealing with some... thing(?) that people would never allow themselves to acknowledge consciously)
In the end, excessively fretting about privacy mostly is costly (in time), increases inconvenience and annoyance, increases the nanny/regulatory state, puts you at greater risk, and just makes the ads being served to you dumber.
I'll reply to what I think is your central claim which is that "my private sex dungeon isn't off limits to cops so why should my hard drive be off limits".
The difference is scale.
For example, my house is not very secure. I lock my doors, but anyone with a crowbar could pretty easily break in and steal my stuff when I'm gone. I live in Seattle, so there's also zero chance they would caught or go to jail. Why am I okay with this state of affairs? Why haven't I put iron bars on all the windows? The answer: there simply aren't enough people willing to commit a home invasion to worry about it.
On the other hand, let's say I had cryptocurrency on my computer. (I don't, by the way). I would take extreme measures to keep this secure because everyone in the whole world could potentially steal my coins.
The number of people that local cops can harass is limited by the resources of the local police department. Salaries aren't cheap.
The number of people that government spy agencies can harass is much more scalable. The Canadian truckers had their bank accounts frozen less than 2 years ago! We need digital privacy so that a government bureaucrat can't change a 1 to a 0 and lock a million dissidents from their bank accounts.
Scale matters.
I brought up the wholesale surveillance concern here https://www.themotte.org/post/851/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/183482?context=8#context
It's not a complete response to your comment though.
Scalable harassment is worrying, though I don't see how this is a function of privacy really? Like how would you solve the de-banking problem? Is the problem that it was too easy for the government to figure out who all of the protestors were and then work backwards to find their financial accounts and lock them down?
Irony of ironies, the extremely technically competent anarchist friend who had his self-hosted personal email hacked was because the attacker was an organized criminal who knew he had millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency. The level of sophistication deployed by the attacker was astounding, which included producing faked search warrants. The attacker also already somehow had copies of his driver's license and we have no idea how he got it. They were not successful in stealing his Bitcoin but they came very close and this criminal continues to pop up in his life from time to time using information he gathered.
See also that a Bitcoin core developer was hacked recently https://www.theblock.co/post/198688/bitcoin-developer-pgp-exploit
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