Personal privacy is, and has always been, the job and responsibility of the individual. You can be as private or as public as you allow yourself to be through your own practices. Nobody can give you privacy, you must take it, which requires work and sacrifices that most people are simply unwilling to make, that's why nothing has changed. If it's privacy you want, stop being so public. Avoid surveillance. It's not easy but it's also not impossible, you have to actually value your privacy enough to do the work of establishing it. Good luck.

That is overly simplistic to the point where it is hard to interpret it as good faith.

We live in a world where both the government is increasingly spying on everything, often in secret, as well as companies in every aspect of modern life who constantly lie about this. It is not a fair choice with natural disadvantages.

Blaming all this on the individual reeks of bad faith.

> If it's privacy you want, stop being so public. Avoid surveillance. It's not easy but it's also not impossible, you have to actually value your privacy enough to do the work of establishing it

I can't avoid traffic cams by any sane means (like taking side roads?) I MIGHT be able to do without the electric company and water company (which I do during outages) but I am not seeing how to avoid the DMV and USPS, which sell my data.

Does a privacy seeker have to be a prepper? I certainly hope not.

Surveillance capitalism and policing is so pervasive. And the connection is money. Especially with Citizens United, laws are bought to trash any right to, or even possibility of privacy.

Not bashing your post, just pointing out the extreme difficulty.

Can you explain what you mean by "job" and "you must take it".. what does that mean in concrete terms?

And what do you mean by "sacrifices"? For example, if students don't agree to TurnItIn's policy, it becomes significantly harder to take classes. Do you mean to say students should have to suffer the consequences of these sacrifices just because we can't seem to support their right to privacy?

yes, if have zero friends and family, contact and talk to no one, move out in the boonies away from everyone else, then you can have privacy. Good to know

Yeah, and I think it's gotten much worse with LLMs. If someone wants to use an LLM privately, their two options are either redacting/morphing their data before sending it through or hosting locally, both of which are intractable for most users. And if someone chooses not to use an LLM they face a dramatic loss in productivity. I don't think the tradeoff between privacy and convenience has ever been this severe in history, with the exception of the smartphone.

Unrestricted invasion of privacy and considering it completely normal is just a libertarian fantasy