> Most users seem to not care about ad tech/tracking

Most people don't understand that they're being tracked. The ones that do generally don't understand to what extent.

You tend to get one of two responses: surprise or apathy. When people say "what are you going to do?" They don't mean "I don't care" they mean "I feel powerless to do anything about it, so I'll convince myself to not care or think about it". Honestly, the interpretation is fairly similar for when people say "but my data isn't useful" or "so what, they sell me ads (I use an ad blocker)". Those responses are mental defenses to reduce cognitive overload.

If you don't buy my belief then reframe the question to make things more apparent. Instead asking people how they feel about Google or Meta tracking them, ask how they feel about the government or some random person. "Would you be okay if I hired a PI to follow you around all day? They'll record who you talk to, when, how long, where you go, what you do, what you say, when you sleep, and everything down to what you ate for breakfast." The number of people that are going to be okay with that will plummet. As soon as you change it from "Meta" to "some guy named Mark". You'll still get nervous jokes of "you're wasting money, I'm boring" but you think they wouldn't get upset if you actually hired a PI to do that?

The problem is people don't actually understand what's being recorded and what can be done with that information. If they did they'd be outraged because we're well beyond what 1984 proposed. In 1984 the government wasn't always watching. The premise was more about a country wide Panopticon. The government could be watching at any time. We're well past that. Not only can the government and corporations do that but they can look up historical records and some data is always being recorded.

So the reason I don't buy the argument is because 1984 is so well known. If people didn't care, no one would know about that book. The problem is people still think we're headed towards 1984 and don't realize we're 20 years into that world

> If you don't buy my belief then reframe the question to make things more apparent. Instead asking people how they feel about Google or Meta tracking them, ask how they feel about the government or some random person.

This is exactly what I was saying - if you look at the polls, people actually tend to support things like the UK's Online Safety Act. Explaining it more does not usually result in a change of that. The difference with a PI is you're asking about them individually instead of everyone - of course they trust themselves, they just want everyone surveilled for that same feeling of confidence.

This is a lot of text to say that people don't recognize digital tracking as a threat, even when it is explained to them. Which is basically exactly what parent post you replied to said.

People don't care. This is demonstrably true.