Convenience, in my mind, has never been worth the price of losing anonymity.
I mean, sure, engineers built Echo/Alexa and the Equifax website. But engineers also built Signal and HIBP. Programmers vary in their concern for privacy, just like any other group, but my general experience is that they skew more privacy-conscious than the general consumer.
The writers who admit that often frame it as hypocrisy, but that's the usual sloppiness of conflating individuals with group averages. I doubt the people who wrote VTech's godawful software are particularly privacy-focused in their personal lives, while the engineers using encrypted messaging and password managers also tend to have scruples in the office.
At a certain point the whole thing feels like blaming mechanical engineers for the military-industrial complex. Sure, someone found a team that would build Predator drones, but that tells us less about mechanical engineers than it does about the government.
Techies generally like privacy in my experience, but most of them also value a steady paycheck more than they value your privacy.
Sort of like how many factory workers like fishing, but they value a steady paycheck more than they value the health of your river. And again, the suits just see the river as a free way to get rid of otherwise expensive waste.
The trend has been for companies such as FB, Google, LinkedIn, etc to enforce "real name policies." And most commenter systems on large media sites want you you to login using a Google+ or Facebook account. I would say anonymity has seen a fast and steady decline.
Obviously as a human existing into some manner of time with family and friends and coworkers, I'm _known_ by those who could/should, but I don't need Amazon parsing conversations in my kitchen.
It's not a spectrum. You are a user and you are rationalizing your cognitive dissonance. Just delete it, those things are completely useless/pointless and you're being tracked regardless of whatever precautions you take. You are on it, or you are not.
Must maintain? With who? Do you use FB to exclusively chat to your wife and boss or something? Will the stasi knock at your door for not checking in with Lord Zuckerberg every 5 minutes?
I find it incredibly difficult to believe that there are people who's ONLY platform of communication in a digital age is Facebook. I don't mean 'primary', I mean 'only'.
If your 'friends' much less family won't keep in contact with you because of choice of platform, can you really say they are your friends/family? If we didn't live in an age of cellphones, if calling is too much effort, would they have ever come to visit me in person?
I deleted all that crap way back and only a few people came out of the wood work, the rest I forgot about and couldn't remember if I tried.
In reality the only effect social media has is lowering barriers to communication, letting in all the shit connections. Much like a dam. Lower it, and the crap water comes in. Same with this, just makes it easier to be connected, which is built on the illusion that these connections are now somehow important.
I have yet to encounter a plausible real life scenario that requires facebook. At best, it might add a tiny bit of convenience to your life wrt events/comm. But it's nothing that can't be easily replaced.
I have tried to lose these applications for a week or month at a time and I do miss out on the latest happenings with them. I have tried to switch them to different services but for one reason or another they don't like it and want to go back.
Commonly this is the switching cost of learning how a new app works but to lose those friendships are not worth the anonymity that I gain from not using the services.
I don't see it as a switching cost. Well I do, but only in the beginning. You switch the thing on and you are exposed to X more people. Then it seems like switching it off you're losing those people, but you're probably just going back to your original state.
>Commonly this is the switching cost of learning how a new app works but to lose those friendships are not worth the anonymity that I gain from not using the services.
It is to me. I would definitely make a switch for a friend if all it was was changing an app. If they can't do the same, like they literally couldn't download or use a different fucking app then they can fuck off. Like our friendship is worth so little they can't EVEN be bothered to download an app. Fuck those people.
Do you seriously call such people "friends"?
When I told my family I was getting off of those types of platforms and only using email/phone/text, there was absolutely no issues on their end keeping up with communication. If anything, I was able to cut down on the chatter and only keep up comms with two really close friends, the rest were just acquaintances that I don't mind not getting updates on.
I realize such a situation is an outlier, but you must realize that if you could not conceive of this, there's probably many more situations you could not conceive of. For better or worse, things like Facebook are now a staple in our lives. If it means being able to follow along with my daughter's growing up, I'll subscribe to whatever the hell social network she's on.