Comment by butlike
In the nicest way possible: who cares? So "they" know my vile pornographic proclivities, my daily commute, and probably what color my poop was this morning. Then what? I get embarassed?
Snowden showed the NSA has taps upstream, so in my book: that's over. I'm fairly convinced if your company reaches a size where it could potentially be a national security threat, the government comes knocking (Facebook, Apple, Twitter, etc.), so that seems like it's over. You have the AI companies scraping god knows what. And, I imagine most countries have corollaries.
Really, all the bad actors I'd encounter in my daily travels would be ones who want to steal money from me. That's a simple ideology. I can handle that. My identity gets stolen, my bank account...there's multiple levels of billion dollar companies with vested interest in me not losing faith in "the system," so I'm not worried about it really.
If a company wants to associate my phone number to glean all my purchases forever in order to target tailored ads to me, fine. Again, it's in the spirit of taking my money, which is a simple ideology.
If the neighbors want to snoop on my traffic, hats off to them for having the capacity to live two lives: both theirs, and mine after they figure out my day-to-day dealings. Doubt they have time to do much about it. Hard enough to live one life in 24 hours.
If the government wants to try and keep tabs on everything to see who's making ICBMs and who isn't, or whatever else they want to do, that's their prerogative but it seems like a complex goal that doesn't affect me.
That's one way to look at it, mine is no data goes out or in unencrypted, and for me it's simple. Adtech? "No." - let packet kiddies get my home IP address? "No."
It's as simple as that: No thanks, then I slide the slider on WireGuard and then I have an encrypted tunnel that all of my devices can communicate with each other, use a DNS through the tunnel with domains blocked and I can control what phones home and what doesn't. I'm not concerned with foreign governments, snoopy neighbors, war driving, or anything.
I can't solve all the problems but there are no what ifs on my end, *What if" -> No.
I'm not a number in some algorithm or malicious because I route my data securely, I'm a human being.