So, I have been in a heated argument with my School Friend about Privacy. I constantly tried to convince him on how Privacy Matter and you should be serious about it, but, in return he said that he don’t care about Privacy and he don’t care about Discord, Facebook, Google, Microsoft spying on him. I even tried to attach some links to Facebook-Cambridge Data Scandal and tried to show him that how these Companies are using our data to manuplate us, but still I got the same response. He also stated that,
“And how is it bad for you if they are getting rich bcuz of u?”, “What i asked was, how is it affecting you? Is it taking away your money? Giving u a bad reputation? Wasting any of your time? Energy?”, “If it’s not giving me any loss, i don’t care what they do with my data, I mean, if i don’t get any bad reputation or embarrassment cuz of it, i don’t even mind going to the bathroom with the door open”
Please help me to explain to him the Importance of Privacy and how it Matters the most!
Thank you, Have a great day ahead.
It’s about all our data in aggregate, not about your friend’s data in particular.
And yet it still affects your friend. How? Through other people. By having access to all that data the IT powers-that-be can easily build data models to manipulate people into many things, without them even realising it. Making political topics trend, encouraging harmful habits (like doom scrolling) and so on. That all leads to worse people getting elected, which leads to worse roads, worse taxes (higher/lower, whatever your friend thinks), more pollution and so on. That all affects your friend.
Also, what your friend said is that they basically don’t care if other more vulnerable people get manipulated into all those things he said (wasting time, money, time is money btw, etc…) because they themselves aren’t affected. Do they think of themselves as a person that’s that self-absorbed/selfish? Probably not.
And your friend might also say, yeah fine, whatever, but I’m also just a fish in the sea, me changing my approach won’t change anything for society. But do they vote?
You have to lead by example. It has to start from somebody, it has to start from all of us. That’s how black people no longer had to sit in the back of the bus in the US. It started small. That’s how gay people get to marry. It started small. And that’s how people won’t get manipulated by their online feeds. It starts small.
And if your friend is still, yeah, whatever, it doesn’t affect me, tell them about the: first they came for x, but I wasn’t an x, then they came for y, but I wasn’t a y, then they came for z, but I wasn’t a z, then they came for me, but there was nobody left to stand up for me.
Your friend is encouraging behaviours that will bite either them in the ass, or their descendants one day. It will be a war, it will be a law, it will be climate change and a forest fire, that could have been prevented if people cared.
And all it takes is a new messenger, new browser, a single add-on in it, and maybe a new website or two. They’re not being asked to be a superhero, just to use a different computer programme. And that’s all.
This. And it’s very hard to explain/understand how it works because it is very abstract and works on a massive scale. For me the main issue is that they are building a massive super weapon that manipulates the whole of human kind. And each timw you use facebook, whatsapp, google, whatever, you give food to this machine. Check out www.contrachrome.com