this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2024
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No one cares about this stuff but techies/Lemmy. Regular people don't care, like at all. They know tech companies do this stuff but if convenience>privacy, most people take the former every time to make life easier. Data privacy is not a tangeable thing in most people's minds.
There would have to be some sort of cataslismic event to wake people up enough for people to do anything meaningful. I don't know what that would be, but I hope someone figures that out sooner rather than later.
I don't think some mass "waking up" event is going to occur, but every time another headline about it shows up, it gets more difficult to ignore or not care about it. and every time someone who's on the fence about the issue will pay more attention to it, and perhaps use the offending platform less. baby steps.
besides, I wouldn't say people don't care, they do when they get offered a choice: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/96-of-us-users-opt-out-of-app-tracking-in-ios-14-5-analytics-find/
I read this and ask "What is your intention with this post?" What is gained if everyone is this jaded?
everytime I tell someone there are alternatives to using Google/Apple/etc their response is, "but it's just so easy". I guess you can call my view of that jaded, but people really don't care? I mean I'm not trying to be defeatest at all, it's just trying to accurately appraise people's apathy to apply a proper resolution to the problem.
The solution has to make it "easy" for people because that is what they expect of technology now.
Honestly I'm too apathetic to care if what you're saying is accurate or not. I am asking what are you trying to accomplish by convincing apathetic people they're apathetic?
Oh you can't change apathy really. I was just suggesting if privacy friendly tech (ie: Linux) is to go mainstream, that it would have to be "easier" than what is currently out there to gain mainstream popularity.
Desktop linux is almost there, but the general population mostly uses mobile devices now, and phone Linux seems to be a dying prospect.
Ahh, so by making Linux "easier" we're preparing for that eventual opportunity (from a disaster) where the public goes looking for something better.
I don't think this is true. Most people do care, in my anecdotal experience. I am not in tech circles. It is not a niche thing to be concerned about these days.
Eh, most do care, they just don't do anything about it. My siblings and brothers don't like that companies like Google and Facebook harvest so much data, yet they continue using them.
So whether people care isn't a particularly interesting question, I'm more interested in what people are willing to do about it. Will they change what services they use? Would they change who they vote for (if a party actually prioritized privacy)? How much are they willing to pay to not have data harvested? And so on. Those are interesting questions.
Disagree. I think everyone deserves a reasonable degree of privacy and interoperability and choice as a protected right, within the markets and services we already have.
I agree with that as well, I just don't think the average person puts that at the top of their voting priorities, and as such, the major candidates don't say anything about privacy when running for office.
I feel like positioning the 'average person' as always disengaged or never doing enough reads more like an attempt to define in/out groups than a genuine effort to actually do anything about the problem.
Understanding the average person (or rather, the mode of the population on a given topic) helps to craft a strategy. If the average person doesn't prioritize privacy, the solution probably isn't to run a big campaign around a privacy bill, but to attack the issue of privacy at the fringes on things the average person does care about (e.g. right to repair for farmers, cars, and consumer devices; even abortion). You can point to privacy as being the main, underlying theme here, but focus the energy on things that actually have a chance of success.