I agree with you, and if you frequent tech circles you'd be under impression that the masses prioritize lack of surveillance and privacy. In my experience with IRL acquaintances, although anecdotal, exactly 0% of people I have spoken to where it's come up in conversation care at all about privacy or surveillance in general with the old "nothing to hide" fallacy.

It just takes some more explaining.

Most folks do care, they just don't understand. When you stop with the high level topics like "surveillance" and start in on the practical impacts like:

- They charge you more if they know you want something (ex - dynamic pricing).

- They try to get you addicted (gambling, vapes, social media)

- They feed you lies (curated social bubbles)

- They manipulate elections (targeted campaigns and ads, targeted social policies)

Etc... most people do actually care, they just struggle to relate the words the industry uses with the real impacts.

Folks tend to think of privacy like someone opening the bathroom door on them (and this gets immediate pushback... see all the articles about the Roomba cameras). But the surveillance we're under now is more subtle and insidious, less visceral. Harder for folks to understand without concrete impacts.

----

The reason so many tech people care is because lots of them get to watch the sausage being made, and they understand.

  > exactly 0% of people I have spoken to where it's come up in conversation care at all about privacy or surveillance in general with the old "nothing to hide" fallacy.

Are they going to the toilet more often this week? Are they booking a flight for a funeral? Do they watch midget porn? Are they interested in science experiments that go boom? Did they just get a promotion at work? Did their car just fail the yearly inspection? Are they going on vacation and leaving the house empty for a week? Does their child have ADHD? Did their catalytic converter just get stolen? Is their phone model no longer receiving security updates? Is their child bullied at school? Did they have an abortion? Are they contemplating bankruptcy? Did they just start using a CPAP machine? Did they vote for an independent candidate? Do they listen to the local mosque's podcast? Do they smoke? Are they closet homosexual? Are they being sued? Did their dog just suffer liver failure? Did they put their teenage daughter's child up for adoption?

These are all things that your phone knows about you, which could lead to negative consequences if exposed - ranging from embarrasment to blackmail, higher prices to actual denial of services, scrutiny to arrest. Everyone has something to hide.

That's my experience as well. However, I suspect a lot of it is not really understanding the situation, and not wanting to be bothered learning about it. In other words, I think it's possible those preferences could be changed with the right kind cultural or legal shifts. Even in my lifetime, I look at how massively public attitudes have changed around smoking, wearing seatbelts, and recycling, to take 3 examples. Each of those seemed equally immovable at one time.

I know its won't solve everything but couldn't we teach digital hygiene at school and its importance. For myself I remember in English at high school being taught how different methods of advertising worked and that stuck with me.

Technologists seem to lack professional integrity. This blasé blame-the-victim attitude is completely normalized but I don’t think it makes sense if you zoom out far enough.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46757509

There are many exceptions and initiatives like truly altruistic OSS projects which aim to empower users. But by and large what we have ended up with is a divide between the tech-empowered and in-the-knows (surveillance etc.) contrasted with people who just want to access their photos on their phone and their computer.

The everyman being enlightened to all the abstract BS in IT is untenable. But programmers aren’t stepping up to collectively protect all of us.