Some of my friends, who aren't in tech nor are privacy-inclined, were shocked to receive an alert that data on them had been exposed in a data breach.

The data had been collected by a third-party without their consent!

Not long after, the dataset became available and now it is one of the top result when you type their names in Google.

While the data isn't embarrassing, it includes some personal stuff they wanted to keep private.

That they had not even consented into giving that data made them feel violated. And truth is, that happens everyday. Which made me think that privacy is truly a consent issue at heart.

Now for a "fun" exercise, imagine how many CRMs out there run on insecure machines and what are the odds that there's someone incompetent enough to leave these databases publicly exposed and not password protected. IMO, it's extremely likely.

Well, they have very strong opinions on privacy now. I guess that's the only way people will care, sadly.

I don’t really care about privacy on my internet searches, but google isn’t what it once was.

It’s not uncommon that I have to go to the second or third page of results, or even refine my query and then go to the second or third page of results to find what I’m looking for.

If I set search filters to the last 24 hours, and search for an event, like the recent hurricane. Half the results that pop up lead to spam sites.

Google wasn’t like that before. Until last year, I don’t think I’d ever visited the second page of search results on google, unless I was searching for something really obscure or niche.

If DDG wasn’t terrible for non English searching, I’d use it exclusively. Not because of privacy, but because Google really sucks these days.

For E-mail I switched to Runbox.com, this was partly because of privacy, but it was primarily because the new gmail client kind of sucks in safari/Firefox, and despite invading my privacy, those 2-3 advertisement-pretend-to-be-real-mail-annoyances they put on top of your inbox, never actually advertise anything I’m even remotely interested in, unless I’ve already bought it.

It’s been much longer, but my first smartphone was an android. When it got ridiculously slow after two years, even when rooted and fresh installed, I got angry and bought an iPhone. I’ll never own an android device again, this is also partly because of privacy (I’d want the play store) but it’s mainly because of useability.

I’m happy people are taking privacy more serious, I should too, but my main reason for not chosing google products, is that they’ve become inferior. I mean, I think google maps is the real test on whether or not you care about privacy. OSM and Apple maps aren’t terrible, but I think most people still use google maps even though it’s arguably one of the most privacy intrusive things you’ll ever use.

I do use DDG a lot, but I still have to resort to GG almost 50% of my search when I don't get meaningful results. So I think there is still a lot of work to do before someone can really fully migrate to DDG. My 50c.

The number is still very low - I'm probably responsible for 30 of those searches myself, so at most there are a million like me.

As long as they're getting enough traffic to survive and grow it's a good thing, though. They just have to exist and have enough mindshare that when Google hits their major stumble, that media story that terrifies the general public, that public will know they have the alternative and take it.

Search isn't facebook; if it weren't for Google's manipulation of its monopoly power, there'd be absolutely no friction in switching search.

That saying does seem to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, so I look forward in the same way.

I predict that a large swath of the population still won't care much about privacy, or at least take action to protect theirs, but I'm seeing an awakening of people coming to realize how dangerous big tech can become. What's funny to me is if Google wasn't so brazen in ditching their old "don't be evil" pretense, we probably wouldn't be having this discussion as often as we are.

I think people in tech underestimate how much normal people care. Maybe it is because tech people mix with the sort of tech-crazed consumerist who is more likely than most to swallow the kool-aid and disregard privacy concerns. In my personal life I have been surprised many times by how privacy conscious normal people are.

Just today my wife's "friend" tagged her in a photo without asking. Public photo with face and location and full name. The post is available to public as well. So who cares about privacy once again?