this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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I think about this every day, but I keep coming back to this: they do care. It's just that they don't always know they care, or to what extent. The big problem is that there's virtually no way to visualize the harm in using privacy-invading products and services. Everything that goes on in the background of our phones, we'd never tolerate in real life.
If you could visually see every time there's a background process, an app activating the mic, the sensors, the location, accessing your messages, etc., we'd be in a better position.
There's no way we'd tolerate the IRL equivalents of what goes on digitally—at the browser level, at the app level, perhaps even at the OS level.
It's usually visual cues that set off change. Think about it this way: 9/11 killed ~3000 people and we got the USA PATRIOT Act virtually overnight. COVID-19 happened and killed ~1.1 million people in the US alone. But because COVID wasn't as "visual" and as "graphic" as 9/11, there was less urgency to do something about it.