I've been saying this for a long time, but there's no technical solution to staying private. It's not scalable and no one has time to janitor every product and service they use in their lives.
The only solution to it is regulation. Fortunately one rich guy in California is putting his personal money up to move the ball forward [1]:
>Mr. Mactaggart said his 2020 state ballot initiative, among other things, would create a state enforcement agency, limit targeted advertisements based on geolocation and add items covered by the “negligent data breach” section, which would allow consumers to pursue legal action in more instances of a hack.
>Most significantly, Mr. Mactaggart said, his new effort would make it harder to adjust the current law any further. The initiative includes a “purpose and intent” section that requires any amendment to the law to be in the service of protecting consumers’ rights to privacy, a legally binding clause that Mr. Mactaggart said would prevent industry from chipping away at the measure.
CCPA is a mediocre version of GDPR, but it's certainly better than the status quo.
>The lobbying against Mr. Mactaggart’s earlier initiative kept it from the ballot in 2018, and legislators instead passed the privacy law. “It was the right thing to do because there was no guarantee at the ballot box,” Mr. Mactaggart said of his agreement to drop his measure. “Now, it’s different because we have the law.”
>Mr. Mactaggart said he would do whatever it takes to pass his initiative next year, including spending millions of his own money. He bankrolled his last campaign almost entirely himself, spending more than $3 million. Mr. Mactaggart will have to collect more than 623,000 signatures for his new initiative to qualify for the ballot. A survey in October by Goodwin Simon Strategic Research of 777 registered voters in California found that most supported Mr. Mactaggart’s initiative.
If you care about privacy, help this guy get his ballot initiative over the finish line. California can serve as inspiration for other state privacy laws (and may just become the default, as it often does). Tech people love scale, and you know who has scale? Governments. You can't fix a systemic problem like lack of privacy with individual action.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/activist-behind-californias-new...