I firmly believe that one of our greatest current failures as a society is the extent with which we completely accept these types of dystopic conditions - every single action we take and word we type is surveilled, permanently stored with zero recourse, analyzed or blocked by untransparent third-party data leviathans that share few of our own interests, and often sold, shared, and completely neglected while data breaches happen en masse. Not only do we have virtually no ability to opt out of this, but these practices now begin the moment someone is born.

When I was younger I spent a lot of my time advocating for privacy, informing people of how bad the state of surveillance was, how bad it would be in the future, and what we could do to improve things. Eventually this turned out to be very bad for my mental health, because I not only realized most people didn't give a shit, but also that no matter what I did, I had no power to improve things by what felt like a even single epsilon.

With the advances we're making in hardware and machine learning, I think we are setting ourselves up for future disasters that we have barely begun to imagine - our entire society's communications and thoughts are owned by everyone except ourselves, and our ability to analyze, predict, and censor the populace with this extreme centralization of power and data is currently being scaled up even more by every tech/ad/communications corporation (and government) in the world.

I still try to do what I can, but it feels like I'm able to do less and less with each passing year; I am constantly forced to use products and services that do terrible things with the data they collect on me, yet it is increasingly becoming something outside of my control. Perhaps this makes it obvious why normal people rarely try to use privacy-preserving software and practices: they recognize how difficult and hopeless the endeavor is, and they'd rather not dedicate their lives to such an impossible feat such as communicating privately with their friends and family. The only things I can really hope for here is that we get an actual data protection law or basic consumer bill of rights in countries like the US, but I don't see this happening any time soon.

I also predict that the general populace will recognize the vast importance of this issue in the future (whether that is +5 or +30 years, I have no clue), but likely only after some very terrible events occur (it would seem the current state of advertisements, data breaches, mass surveillance, and censorship is nowhere near what it will take). This comment turned out to be more negative and hopeless than I had wanted, so I'll add that I also donated to the EFF - they seem to be pretty principled and helpful in this area, and they also sent me a cool T-shirt. I'm fortunate that I'm able to use software like Signal/IRC/Matrix with my close friends, but I wish that everyone else could be given the right of private self-expression and communiucation as well.