That sounds like: “Freedom doesn’t matter because some freedoms are already gone”

I mean, Google might have your info, but why make it easier for non-Google adversaries to like, say, scammers have access to your bank info, or your emotionally abusive parents parents have access to your digital journal?

Even if we can’t hide it from governments or corporations, there are still inter-personal privacy to maintain, and that can be more significant and impactful to your everyday life, than you being just file on a large database.

I don’t use Google or Microsoft. Also it takes no effort, you’re lazy or you don’t care.

Ok, what is your social security number, email address with password, your date of birth, and if applicable, your mother’s maiden name.

It’s all out there right?

If the rise of techno-lords of this neo-feudalist era hasn’t made it clear to people why privacy is important then it isn’t even worth having the conversation with those people anyway. Privacy is an spectrum and 100% privacy is extremelly difficult to achieve and potentially not worth pursuing to the average people unless your life or someone else’s you love is under threat.

But while 100% is not worth it to the average people, getting very close to it isn’t super difficult nowadays granting you have or know someone with the technological knowledge to achieve it: Nowadays you can use Firefox with proper adblocker extensions for free, get a phone that is de-googled out of the box, you can switch social networks from centralised ones to federated ones, self-host a lot of cloud services very cheaply, etc. True that some technical knowledge (and time) is required to achieve a decent level of privacy. Finding the time isn’t that difficult if one cares a little (they are one online search away), the technical bit is the hard one and maybe a good reason for those of us that self-host to start federating more and more services (but this is another conversation). The fact is, who nowadays doesn’t care about privacy is because they have chosen to do so.

So if the conversation even arises, I sometimes flip it by pointing out how shitty their preferred online service (or even operating system) has become in the recent years, just to tell them I have a totally different online experience than them. If they are curious I can show them how, if not, then they shouldn’t care about me as it’s obvious they don’t care about themselves in the first place.

I don’t even try to argue with these people. Thankfully, I have all the important people in my life trained up on proper cybersecurity practices and how to be good end users. It makes dealing with any tech issues for them so much easier lol. I only got yelled at once by a relative and I told him he needed to fix his tone before I’d fix his computer. He hasn’t given me any issues since lol

Then property ownership doesn’t matter, because the land is ‘all out there’ so anyone can go/live anywhere regardless of who owns the property, right?

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good and if not for yourself but your friends and family. You would want them being stalked online right?

Public figures? Probably true to some degree.
(Even Linus Torvalds said that. He argued that anything that’s worth being backed up, will probably be).

The run of the mill Joe Doe? No.

It’s not “all out there”, unless you let it go out there.

Most interaction with people on privacy-hostile services are out there, yes. But that’s far from “all”.

I’m pretty late but hopefully this helps someone:

Privacy is in the moment. It isn’t just about your SSN, or the email address you had ten years ago even you signed up for Pegging by Peggy newsletters. It’s a moving target and the highest value for the people that want your data is as close to right now as possible.

If you digitally disappeared in this moment the value of all the shit they have on you would rapidly decline.

It also is about as complete a picture as possible. Privacy violating data points are valuable in aggregation. An address and name are only valuable when you can tie it to viewing preferences, voting records, etc. The more data points you can hide, the better.

Also, many (most?) people will be more upset with the person who rocks the boat or is the messenger of bad news than the perpetrator of the real problem. “We’ve tried nothing and are all out of ideas” applies to people you might care about just as much as it does to Schummer.

There’s not much point arguing with these people as they’ve already decided that they don’t care about it and it’s not my place to convince them they should

In America in 2025, I’d say they’re right*. Flock has cameras all over cities, Palantir has scary face recognition data that iirc uses social media info up to a decade old, DOGE made a database of everyone’s social security information that other bureaus probably have access to, ICE uses Israeli spyware that bypasses end-to-end-encryption, and state governments are trying to push VPN bans and ID checks to use web services. On the federal level, both MAGA and Democrats are pro-surveillance, so you can’t just vote this out, not completely. You also can’t vote with your wallet since the most dangerous surveillance tools exist at the infrastructure level. We’re one step away from turning into China.

*By and large, there’s nothing Americans can do about those things other than protest, normalize pro-privacy rhetoric, try not to support privacy-invading consumer services, and call local- and state-level elected leaders when new anti-privacy legislation is introduced.

In most cases, privacy efforts can help for some use cases, but there is no perfect threat model anymore, and it’s mostly a symbolic act of protest these days, which is useful. Lemmy is the only social media I use these days, Linux is my daily and only driver, I’m boycotting tech oligarchs like Google, and I gravitate toward privacy-focused products and services. We need an active privacy advocacy bloc that will support causes and alternative technologies if we ever want things to get better, if not today than in the future.

One big thing people can still do is evade targeted ads. I probably have an ad profile stored somewhere, but I use adblock and enough FOSS apps that I haven’t gotten targeted ad in years.

“Here’s a link, kid. Go read a book.”

Take their bathroom door away since everyone has the same wiggly bits anyway.