Why we gave away our privacy in the first place

Taken from Book: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism:

Spanish conquistadors were bound by their laws to recite an edict before attacking indigenous cultures. Those people of course couldn’t understand what they were being told. Language barrier for one, but there were also concepts taken for granted that did not map to the worldviews of the indigneous peoples like the concept of property rights.

Take this as an analogy for what those of us who were young were faced with when all this technology was new. The concept of digital surveillance was possible to conceptualize, but it didn’t map to any real tangible threat. I wanted to use services to talk with my friends or have fun, but I figured as long as I didn’t do anything regretable no harm no foul.

The idea that my whole life of data lives out there in a database.

Every conversation I have had with my wife since we got together at the age of 18 lives in a database. For anyone to buy. You could go buy that data right now if you had the means and the know how.

This is obviously disgusting to me now.