So are the 45% or so of voters who picked Trump knowing he opposed internet privacy.
tldr: They aren't aware. They aren't techies.
P.S. We're in a two party system. Just because you agree with some policies doesn't mean you agree with all policies.
I literally do not give a damn about anything else other than lowering my taxes. I don't care about climate change (it is being accelerated by humans, I agree) and I literally don't care about BART or SF public transit or homelessness. Just give me my clean air vehicle tag so I can drive in the carpool lane as a single driver in my Model S.
Yes, there are tens of thousands of people like me in the bay area.
STEM folks are the most susceptible to this, I think -- working in a technical field tends to isolate you from other people. Being wealthy and working in a technical field is horribly alienating. You literally, over time, lose the capacity to understand others or consider them as people.
I'm not a Trump fan (nor even American) but I think your analysis of skin colour based demographics is probably flawed in some way.
Yet if it's privatized it's ok.
I think it's fair to say that the (potential for) harm wasn't sufficiently strong in the public psyche to justify White House-level attention prior to (and probably including) W Bush. Also, the distinction between ISP and Telco was still sufficiently weak that existing Telco regulations designed to protect consumer privacy still had teeth when applied to ISPs. It wasn't until the Obama admin that ISPs starting suing to disentangle themselves from Telco regulations.
As for Obama, well... if you haven't heard net neutrality described as "obamacare for the internet", then you're not paying attention. But there's only so much anyone can do with out controlling the Legislative branch.
No, really, your assertion that Obama-era Net Neutrality rules and privacy rules are disconnected is simply wrong! See "What does that have to do with privacy? " on https://www.epic.org/privacy/netneutrality/
When people talk about rolling back FCC rules on net neutrality, they are -- by definition! -- talking about rolling back these privacy protections. There's no debate to be had here.
More generally, you may be confused by timelines. Hopefully this will help:
pre-2014: Phone companies and ISPs begin tracking customers.
2014 - 2016: FCC begins process of cracking down on this sort of behavior (e.g., see top comment on this story).
2017: FCC reverses course on that crackdown.
Perhaps you are claiming that there wasn't a substantive change in valence on the issue of consumer privacy within the FCC and other regulatory agencies over the past six months. And perhaps "net neutrality" means something very specific do you. But that doesn't mean that late Obama-era net neutrality rules weren't aimed and strengthening privacy protections. They were.