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Don't we live in the world where the maximum amount of information about you is widely available? Haven't we for 10+ years or so? The absolute worst that has happened from this is newspaper headline related freak events rather than stuff that happens to everyone. In terms of my personal life, it's telling that the only person I know who has suffered a catastrophic privacy breach is someone that was hell-bent on never trusting Google or Facebook and self-hosted the whole way.
This is a type of person.
I do scoff at them, independent of the avoiding aggregation claim, because in their efforts to protect their privacy because they're so paranoid about the ThE bIG tEcH ComPaniEs they leave themselves far more vulnerable. And effectively island themselves from social activities like, oh, sharing photos with friends.
I'm just here to say when someone tries to share a photo with me from their home nextcloud server and I wait 5 minutes for the account confirmation email to show up, and it never arrives, and I have to help them diagnose whether or not they fucked up their self-hosted mail configuration, it's hard not to judge them as being so conceited that they think a state bureaucrat gives a shit about their private life.
I suppose they could print their photos out and mail them to me. That would be a nice change of pace even. But could I convince them to put a printer inside of their home nowadays? Think of how much closed source firmware those things have which could be reporting every single thing you print to The Powers that Be.
Are you familiar with the existence of the nation of China? The actual "absolute worst" that has happened from a complete lack of digital privacy is government dissidents and people who report the official who sexually harassed them getting disappeared and their organs harvested. You're talking about how all these silly paranoid privacy people have concerns that could never be realistic, and all the while we can just go look at one of the largest nations on Earth and see what happens when you get your way.
I did not say lets also become an authoritarian dictatorship at the same time. I am specifically criticizing privacy warriors in the US.
See also the bottom of this other comment: https://www.themotte.org/post/851/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/183628?context=8#context
This is makes about as much sense as "come on, baby, just the tip", for all the derision you lob at privacy advocates this is insanely naive given what has already happened in the west, let alone their open drooling at China's social credit system.
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Do you think authoritarian dictatorships announce themselves as authoritarian dictatorships and democratically ask the people to vote on their takeover? The privacy warriors in the US are looking over at places like China, Russia and the UK and seeing almost exactly the things they were warning about being implemented, and you're calling them paranoid when they take umbrage at US politicians talking about how great those things are and wanting to bring them here! One of the major arguments made by the privacy warriors is that even if you give the government this power now because you trust it not to become an authoritarian dictatorship, it is impossible to tell when one of those is coming down the pipe. Yes, it sucks that the one pedophile who was capable of using encryption perfectly to hide his crimes got away, but that's utterly insignificant when compared to the danger posed by our current panopticon if it were to fall into the wrong hands, and there is no way of making sure that it does not fall into the wrong hands. Both sides of politics believe that their opposition will use this power corruptly, and I'm honestly not sure either of them are wrong.
Your argument is essentially saying that it is fine to not have seatbelts because you personally haven't crashed your car and don't think you're going to crash it in the near future (yeah sure other people get into car crashes but you're built different), and the people saying "hey you should wear a seatbelt" are just paranoid, low-status losers who shouldn't be listened to.
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Maximum? Last I checked we still have not reached the elite's wet dream of all our activities being done through a uniquely identifying digital identity.
This is again incoherent in the light of your "it's all aggregated" criticism. These will never be things that happen to everybody, because manipulating society by manipulating each individual is the most inefficient way to go about it that I can think of. That doesn't change the fact that the measures they already took to monitor and control the flow of information already justify burning everything down and salting the earth.
You don't get to do that. People avoiding Big Tech aren't doing so for fear of being super-haxxored, they do so to avoid centralizing power. You especially don't get to do that after claiming they ignore the aggregated nature of surveillance.
We already had Google removing documents with wrongthink that got too popular. That I am personally not important to them is not relevant to my argument.
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