I think you overestimate the amount that the average person cares about their privacy.
We should reword this nearly-true claim to avoid spreading a pernicious myth. Let's try:
"I think you overestimate the amount that the average person understands about their privacy."
People care. They don't understand. Indeed, they are actively misled. That is not a fair foundation for assertions like "people don't care about X".
Many people are severly uninformed or have closed themselves off to information, that could disturb their comfort with FB and the likes (ha, pun not intended, but it works!). Many people are computer illiterates, addicted to their "drug of choice" and kept in place via network effect of "all their friends and family being on FB/WA/whatever" and they too are part of the problem, increasing the network effect.
I've had discussion with people, where I told them, that FB had the biggest personal data scandal in history (financially, in terms of what they had to pay), and that there is a new thing happening every month or so. Still these people do not want their way of being addicted shaken and continue regardlessly, dragging others down with them. I am sometimes at a loss what I can tell them, how I can explain to them what is happening. Telling them, that FB is running on ads, which are tailored to them, by spying on their behavior and mining that data. Nope, message not understood.
You are so right, I can't argue against that. It's the same psychology and social dynamics as why people continue to smoke or use harmful street drugs while seeing the people around them dying or getting sick, and being told every day that it's harmful.
I tried to make as clear, and sensitively as I could in Digital Vegan [1] why I think some digital technologies are a major public health issue, and that we are in the same territory as with tobacco 50 years ago.
One problem is that unlike heroin and tobacco, where the sickness of the victims is a net burden on governments, consumer capitalism, being a form of proxy mass-surveillance, traps governments in an uneasy "see no evil" alliance, if not outright support for digital harms.
Another is that digital harms can be remote, deferred in time and place, thus difficult to connect causally. As with many diseases or pollutants we are still in the early stages of understanding the effects of damage to privacy.
You're so right. What else?
- Safety is inconvenient
- Growth is inconvenient
- Success is inconvenient
- Long term happiness is inconvenient
That's why I consider the word convenience to be the modern form of the Greek work Thanatos, which is the "death drive" toward atrophy, stasis, forgetfulness and rigor mortis. Living is "Inconvenient", and because everything worth having costs something, convenience is "anti-life".
But that's a lot of beard-stroking philosophy. A more interesting question for hackers might be:
"Exactly when did we become the arse-wipers of the world, coddling
everyone in "convenience" lest their delicate brows produce a bead
of sweat or their minds be troubled by a moment of doubt?"
Political scientist Alexis De Toqueville writing in his 1840
Democracy in America [DeTocqueville35] questions the perils of
convenient systems so perfect in their pampering and coddling that
they render life pointless. Of what today we would call cybernetic
governance, he writes:
`` That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and
mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like
that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood;
but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual
childhood: it is well content that the people should
rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For
their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it
chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that
happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and
supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures,
manages their principal concerns, directs their industry,
regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their
inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care
of thinking and all the trouble of living?''Because after all, we don't talk about anything important on a computer - for that, we type up and send a physical letter.
Yeah, that's definitely a sentiment I've seen many times. I'm not sure if there's any scientific explanation/proof, but I see claims that the "vast majority of people are averse to [any] change" a lot in articles and books.
The problem is that the world doesn't care, and changes anyway. So we've moved financials and military to the digital world - which should be the very definition of "important" or "serious" - but people's perception of computers stayed mostly the same: tools for playing games, gossiping with friends, and watching funny cat videos. I think the general population will only catch up to the changes the IT revolution brought in a generation or two. By that time it'll be too late for any kind of regulation, I'm afraid.
That has been intensely studied in behavioral economics and there is a lot of laws that addresses the fact that people actually tend to leave pre-made decisions in place. (This is used in, e.g. laws that regulate consent to organ donation.)
You could argue the wording was loaded or something, but it’s certainly not an “opt-in to tracking” situation.
You couldn’t proceed without picking one of the options.
Secret services are one thing, police operations and investigations are another, spying your own citizens for the sake of spying them and collecting their data is not allowed in EU, but it happened in US (we have proof) and when it happened in Europe it was US companies doing it (Cambridge Analytica data scandal, to name one, was made possible by Facebook).
There's that.