Comment on Data privacy: how to counter the "I have nothing to hide" argument?
ode@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
‘No one’s spying on me, I’m not interesting’ is more pernicious than Nothing to Hide. Most adults can kind of sense the idiocy of the latter refrain. But ask the utterer why advertising is a trillion-dollar industry if their attitudes and behaviours aren’t interesting, or why a data broking industry even exists, and you’ll typically be asked ‘why care?’
What’s harder to work out is whether the utterance is a genuine failure to comprehend the nature of surveillance capitalism, or a grasping denial of its impact, as though they’re only 80 per cent convinced of their footprint’s worthlessness. It’s difficult to convince someone to turn down their data faucet when they barely acknowledge the faucet’s existence to start with.
dangblingus@lemmy.world 1 year ago
My guess is that most people, like you said, fail to grasp surveillance capitalism. They have zero idea of how computers or the internet works, and think that billion dollar companies aren’t connecting data points on their browsing habits to sell them stuff, or even worse, make their findings known to other 3rd parties like insurance companies and scammers. People just literally have no clue. Most people couldn’t even be bothered to educate themselves about what Edward Snowden was talking about.