I’m not cynical, overall I think everything will be fine and will continue advocate for privacy. But all the effort towards privacy seems like kind of Sisyphus myth. I don’t really gain anything by being privacy conscious, I just regain part of what people used to have before internet. Best case scenario is that I don’t exist in eyes of big corps. This just adds to today’s complexity which requires constant effort, just so that things wouldn’t be taken from me.
Actually best case scenario is that they just lump you in with other people who try to get privacy or block ads, because it’s such a miniscule number of people who do it, it’s actually more likely that they can profile you based on your habits of trying to regain privacy.
It’s a vicious cycle, the more you do to try to make yourself anonymous, the more you’re actually just putting yourself in corporations “privacy conscious consumers” box and they’re just waiting for the right products to shill at you. (“I feel like I’m caught in a web!”)
It’s actually part of the reason you see more “privacy respecting services” popping up, with lots of questions about how much they actually respect privacy. Privacy, like everything else, is now a product to be sold.
Also, you don’t actually want to not exist in the eyes of big corps. If you’re stuck using one of their services and you’ve been memory-holed in some way, getting help to solve your issue (your Google account being banned for no reason, your Uber Driver account never given any riders to pick up, and so on.) is nearly fucking impossible. These companies don’t have human customer service anymore, and trying to climb out of a “digital black hole” is a fucking Kafkaesque nightmare.
I’d say it all depends on the user’s threat model. Seeing that part of the younger generation (myself included) are getting more caught up in technology and getting more interested in technology, in time there will be so many people using ad blockers (in fact, there already are a lot of people using ad blockers) that services like google will have to resort to other means of profit. While they try to find a solution, they will try to mitigate the thing that is preventing them from making enough profit in the meantime. In this case, adblocks. Privacy-respecting products are a thing, and some of them being used and trusted by huge corporations (an example would be Nextcloud, which is free to use).
To reclaim privacy is a very hard thing to do, but it was always meant to be this way, whether people like it or not, what drives the world is money, and user data is very profitable in today’s day and age
Luckily, there are things people can do to reclaim their privacy. It is indeed impossible to reclaim 100% of it, but people have the choice to steer away from massive surveillance that happens everywhere. Privacy is a human right that got taken away, but it can be reclaimed. People can be in control
I feel that as more people are getting caught up in technology, less people are actually interested in how things work or how problems can be fixed. Their mentality is that it should just work.
Having technology requiring at least some understanding of it is a great filter for the internet. But that’s gone.