Why does digital privacy matter?

In this post I am talking specifically about online privacy in the context of surveillance capitalism. This means privacy from big tech, online behavioral monitoring, and the constant buying and selling of your personal data.

In my experience people either care about privacy online or they don’t at all. Many people have completely given up all hope at online privacy they are either completely defeatist, apathetic, or straight up combative when you bring up any thing you do to protect your privacy.

Much of this is because almost all privacy measures come at the cost of a loss of convenience or straight up self-imposed social ostracization by avoiding platforms that others use. Which is understandable. While there are small things you can do, generally embracing online privacy requires a large investment of time, mental energy, and possibly money.

So, I want to be able to better articulate a number of arguments that I find compelling as to why online privacy is worth fighting for and what we are losing by allowing big tech to become the middle man of all of our conversations, purchases, decisions, news feeds, music queues, exercise, etc.

1. The right to sanctuary
2. The right to oblivion
3. Sorry but it’s just crazy that I can’t speak with anyone without generating a bunch of metadata for someone else to hoover up and feed into some horrific AI machine hell bent on extracting every penny out of my bank account.
4. Many of our conversations with our loved ones live in a database somewhere for some four eyed freaks to mine for ‘insight’, sell, or even voyeuristically peruse at their leisure (perverts!)
5. The world is a worse place because of these platforms and companies. The incentives of the world have gone upside down. Don’t support this anymore. It doesn’t need to be this way. There are alternatives and they are dependent on people actually using them.
6. They are not done, they are coming for more. The behavioral data surplus is never ending. They want to extract and store every piece of data they can. Everything will be a subscription, every purchase will spy on you, every thing that can be tracked will be tracked.