Very few people care about such things.
Or rather, very few people understand such thing well enough to care about them.
I have seen many comments that this has become worse since the isolation period caused by COVID. I tend to agree but I also think it goes deeper than that. We have some problems in our society that have been festering for much longer and have root causes like inequality, lack of opportunity, and a lack of constructive facilities and positive role models.
I hear a lot from friends who work in education about children coming to school with profoundly disturbing attitudes and other children who have experienced nasty forms of abuse. And yes - absolutely the schools and the government should push back against problems like bullying and misogyny and racism where they can.
But maybe the answer here isn't just trying to lock up this week's negative social media influencer or introduce unusual and potentially dangerous concepts like regulating online content that is "harmful" yet not illegal or expecting governments to spy on us all and interfere in our lives more often. Maybe we should first be asking why so many kids think they have nothing better to do than spend all day watching that nasty online content in the first place. Maybe we should be asking why so many kids are given unsupervised and unregulated access to ideas they aren't ready to deal with yet.
That's about education and children but you can pick almost any hot button topic and find similar examples. Try immigration or people who live entirely off state benefits. You can find plenty of examples where people advocate for papering over social problems but there's a sad lack of discussion about properly fixing the cracks underneath. Those are the real social harms we should be trying to reduce. Unfortunately their perpetrators are often among the first to assume it must be someone else's problem.
That's as old as hierarchy. The Hillsborough disaster was in the 90s: every one tried to shift the blame. The different sex abuse scandals (Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford etc.)? Same shit started early 90s and still going on with looking for people other than police to blame.
I could keep going and going and going. It's so incredibly rare to hear "yeah that's my fault" nowadays, the first reaction is almost always to immediately blame anything else as if it's a magic get out of jail card(because actually, it is a lot of the time).
That's sadly true in a lot of places. Throw in all the optimism vigilantes - who react badly to any suggestion that the police & justice systems aren't straight out of some "Happy Sunshine Good Guys" children's book - plus all the folks who are trivial to stampede with claims that the gov't somehow needs Yet Another Power (to fight pedophiles, terrorists, or whatever pushes their buttons), and the convenient de-emphasis of history in recent decades...
Yeah. Outside of those currently being beaten with the short & dirty end of the stick, freedom has very few supporters.
This is untrue. Here’s a poll from 2019, showing 91% of the US cares:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/11/15/key-takea...
Support for increasing regulation was at about 71% then and still is.
This is a wrong poll, because "privacy" is too broad of a term to meaningfully to assess. Privacy is a "good" thing, so people, of course, respond "I care" because they want to feel good about themselves and care about good things. In reality they don't understand what privacy is and at what price or comes (in terms of inconvenience).
>Support for increasing regulation was at about 71% then and still is.
That's even better. I remember GDPR being legislated, and everyone was extremely fascinated by how much it "protects" the users, and literally a few days after GDPR came into power, my messenger company blocked me with the following message: "according to GDPR, we must keep your personal data private and secret, and since at the moment we don't have any of your personal data, we can't keep them secret, so we're blocking you. Please, upload a photocopy of you passport by following this link (link) to get unblocked".
Again, the word "regulation" is perceived as a "good thing", because the opposite of "regulation" is "chaos, anarchy", and people are afraid of anarchy. If people actually understood what "regulation" means, support would have been way way lower.
Even understanding the risks, there's little that can be done about it.
Use a credit card? Need a mortgage? Care about discounts when buying groceries? Have friends that post photos on social media? Live in a small country?
Privacy is simply unavailable if you want to live in a modern society.
I think that's unnecessarily defeatist. Privacy has never been a black and white concept. We all share some information with some other people for good reasons.
The big change with modern technology has been how easily information can be collected at a massive scale and how many people end up with access to that information and for what purposes they can then use it. Almost none of this change was inevitable or necessary to function in a modern society. Governments could step in to legally regulate the businesses making a fortune off data capitalism any time they wanted to. They just haven't.
A cynic might suggest that this is because those businesses have made an awful lot of money. Some of that goes back to the governments in tax revenues. No doubt some of it also goes back to the politicians in campaign contributions.
A different cynic might suggest that our governments are typically made up of career politics/media/economics types who are woefully underequipped to even understand the capabilities and implications of the technology that has become such a core part of our lives in the past 20-30 years and so almost totally fail to perceive or mitigate the threats it poses.
The OP-post is exactly about the (UK) government stepping in. (With disastrous consequences)
We already have some well-intentioned data protection laws in the UK and some more that we inherited from the pre-Brexit EU GDPR. But their implementation has not been very effective at challenging the culture of harvesting whatever personal data businesses can and then attempting to monetise it. Meanwhile like any regulation they introduce a compliance cost for everyone.
A better attempt in the same spirit but written by people who actually knew what they were doing and enforced by people who had both good intentions and sufficient resources could undermine a lot of the more toxic practices that have built up since the likes of Facebook and Google made planetary scale corporate surveillance a thing.
We could get a long way just by banning two practices - keeping or using personal details provided to make purchases for anything other than administering those sales and incorporating phone-home surveillance into physical products where that surveillance has nothing to do with why a normal customer would buy that product (think TVs, laptops, or cars).
It would also help if governments could lead by example on this issue. They necessarily deal with a lot of sometimes sensitive personal data. They - not just national/federal government but all the spin-out agencies and more local forms of government as well - also have a tendency to abuse data collection powers granted to them by broad surveillance law for debatable reasons.
See my experience with GDPR: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43155582
Don't get me wrong, but I don't believe that the government can do anything good in this respect.
The only thing they can really do is to try to make data hoarding less profitable than it is now.
For example it should be not just perfectly legal, but encouraged to scrape and repost bigtech data elsewhere. So that if you're unhappy with Google keeping your data on Google drive, you could switch to another cloud provider and they would already have all the same data.
That is, instead of going from "all your data is supposedly protected, but actually not" to "all your data is private", we should go from "all your data is supposedly protected, but actually not" to "all your data is public, deal with it".
FWIW I think this is a very practical response far more often than people realise. "Follow the money" is advice as old as money itself. Making behaviours we don't like unprofitable is one of the most reliable ways we have ever found to guide commercial organisations away from those behaviours.
For example it should be not just perfectly legal, but encouraged to scrape and repost bigtech data elsewhere. So that if you're unhappy with Google keeping your data on Google drive, you could switch to another cloud provider and they would already have all the same data.
Again FWIW I agree with busting the data hoarding walled gardens and supporting data portability. I couldn't disagree with you more strongly about making it all public by default but I also don't think that's the only way to solve the portability problem.