Huge data leak shatters the lie that the innocent need not fear surveillance

Trying to be as charitable as possible to anyone who says they don't need to fear surveillance, I don't believe it is because they think the innocent have nothing to fear, but because the sufficiently uninteresting have nothing to fear. Dissident journalists and political activists may be in the right morally and possibly even legally in some countries, but governments nonetheless have quite a tremendous incentive to surveil, imprison, stop, and possibly kill them. That is still not the case for an average citizen.

Trying to get people to care about stuff by convincing them it might someday directly impact them personally seems like a fool's errand to me. Even wars and genocides don't directly impact the vast majority of people, often even in the countries where they're happening. We instead need to figure out how to get people to care about bad things happening to other people. The case needs to be made to fight for freedom and against surveillance even if you're completely certain it will never impact you.

Wow, this is a really good analogy. Sad, but true.

The key issue in your analogy being that we know T1D will actually have long-term consequences if left untreated. We don't yet know the cost of "lack of privacy". Part of me wonders if privacy advocates will be on the same level as doomsday preppers in a few decades, at least in the Democratic world. It's not that they were wrong to prepare for nuclear war given the information available during the Cold War, it's just that it never happened so their efforts were largely wasted.

To use myself as an example: I've had a gmail account since it was invite-only. Was on facebook as soon as it was available to high schoolers. So over 15 years now for both (although I'm basically off facebook at this point because it sucks now, I maintain a skeleton account to use the Marketplace). I've had an android phone for 6 years, used a "free" discount brokerage for years, etc, file my taxes with Turbotax, and use any number of services (including credit cards themselves) that likely sell my data in some form.

Any hard privacy-based damages have yet to materialize beyond a couple of stolen credit card numbers that were easily dealt with.

Now what's the "therapy" for all this?

1. Thoroughly examine the terms and conditions of any service/software I sign up for and actively avoid those who state they'll sell my data, and re-review said terms and conditions every time they're updated, canceling services when/if the terms turn malicious.

That point alone could be a career unto itself.

2. Run an adblocker which will inevitably break some sites and have to be periodically turned off

3. Run a Pi-Hole on a local router

4. Run anti-browser-fingerprinting extensions

5. Use a VPN to obfuscate location data

6. Switch from Android to Apple (and even Apple isn't perfect)

7. Avoid all social media

8. ...

There's an endless list of technical partial solutions that may or may not add up to any real difference, but will definitely consume hundreds or thousands of hours of time in set-up and maintenance and reserach, thousands of dollars in fees over the long haul if using paid services. Plus the daily grind of dealing with non-homogeneous and often 2nd-rate alternative tools because there isn't much money in privacy. All to prepare for a threat that may never materialize and hasn't materialized at all in the over 15 years people have been warning me about the issue.

I drink beer, wine and cider on the weekends. Yes I'm well aware that marginally increases my odds of getting cancer/other nastiness over decades. I don't care, I judge the increased risk negligible compared to the worth of enjoyment/socializing. Privacy falls into that same category for now. I tried using GnuCash to track my finances over privacy concerns. It won't connect to my bank for some reason, spent hours troubleshooting the issue, researching obscure bank communication protocols to no end. Maybe I could have figured it out, but Mint.com works with everything down to my power and gas utilities, was completely set up in less than 30 minutes.

I'd like Privacy, but I think people sneer at the word "convenience" more than they should. Convenience means I get time back, the one resource we all definitely have a finite amount of. And maybe there will be some great privacy crisis some day, in the same sense that there may be nuclear war. I'm not building a fallout shelter any time soon, I've got better things to do.

> Part of me wonders if privacy advocates will be on the same level as doomsday preppers in a few decades, at least in the Democratic world

Related is the fact that people making waves about privacy now have actually made a difference, and even if we're not in a "100% privacy" world, maybe it's good enough.

Reminds me of Y2K. Consumers at the time heard it was a big deal, and then nothing happened. But industry fixed a ton of things that were broken before Y2K so that nothing major did happen.

Biology or no, there are problems with living in giant hives as we do now. We simply don't know (personally) the people who rule us, so there's no question of rule by consent. We don't even know people who know them.

Dunbar's Number squared seems like the ideal population size. Enough people that some level of privacy/anonymity is possible but not so many that rule by a sociopathic elite can emerge.