Ultimately, arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.
Hey you have nothing to hide? Please give me: Your address, bank account info, card numbers, social security, and the information of your family and friends. All passwords. Hand over your wallet too. Give me photos of your fingerprints, genitals, and a 360 view of your head. Why does it matter what I could do with such info? You have nothing to hide, right?
The claim to have "nothing to hide" was not just born our of ignorance, but also out of comfort - to not having to do anything about it.
Now that even the last one accepted that they do indeed have something to hide, but in order to justify their own inaction, it's labeled as inevitable: privacy is not real.
They are lying to themselves, because doing otherwise would mean they have to admit being wrong.
“My simple brain can only think in ‘binary’ and doesn’t understand that development of a successful threat model doesn’t (and often can’t) be perfect, but any incremental change to my behavior and online practices in a way to prevent sensitive information from being shared and potentially utilized by malicious actors is a plus.
Instead of thinking about all of that, I’m going to reduce the whole subject to a nice and neat logical fallacy of ‘online privacy is terrible nowadays, thus it doesn’t matter what I do’ “
Elon Musk popularised this cope argument a few years ago. It sounds intelligent to people who are incapable of any level of critical thinking or nuance and believe everything in the world is either 100% A or 100% B with no in-between. Sadly, this is a large percentage of the population.
"chrome was hogging up my ram" is the dumbest part of all of this lmao, this person's decisionmaking is completely driven by placebo and it's hilarious
A similar argument I hear is "If they want me, they will find and arrest me no matter my precautions".
Kinda yes... But why are you talking about threat models that include someone deliberately hunting you down? We are not high-ranking dissidents or criminals that they would put effort and money into finding. Our concern is passive surveillance - maybe the collected info doing us a disservice (like being leaked for scammers or sold to an evil ex), maybe even something mundane getting flagged and us being arrested just to serve as an example.
Gen Alpha doesn't care about privacy online. They need to be guided by their parents to care, e.g. when they buy a laptop, they install some Linux distribution on it before they give it to the child.
Why? It's because they never arrived at their current behavior by a systematic progression of logical steps. Most of the behaviors we exhibit aren't that way. We just offer a post-hoc explanation/justification. They use edge, so they defend their action with any argument assertion they can think of.
It's also (sort of) because they want to tip the proverbial scale towards their current use. Change takes effort and can be irritating. They have their list of positives about edge (faster, easier, etc.), and they downplay the negatives such as privacy.
I mean, yeah, privacy isn't really a thing in our digital surveillance age. Doesn't mean I'm not gonna make it as hard as possible for them. Make em work for it.
Ultimately, the sentiment isn't completely wrong. Using a different browser isn't going to save you from being tracked. Using one or multiple browser extensions isn't going to save you from being tracked. Using a VPN isn't even going to save you from being tracked.
Accounts are pretty much required to use most sites, and many also require connecting a phone number or other personal details. Privacy is actively discouraged, and attempting to pursue it leaves you with many hardships -- by design I would argue. You buy a product on one site, with no prior search history about it, and suddenly you start getting emails from unrelated sites about similar products. In capitalism, any information about your habits and interests also becomes a commodity. Why shouldn't people dismiss privacy in favor of convenience, in such a system? It seems futile to even try.
And if your government is determined to figure out who you are online, then it will. Don't make the mistake of thinking they don't know what you've been up to, here or otherwise.
Off-topic, but I do agree in general that Edge is a solid browser. I use it when I'm at work and really love the vertical tabs and tab groups. I use firefox for personal use and am patiently waiting for the vertical tabs on the stable release (and not just in about:config).
I do fall into that way of thinking sometimes and in discussions and such, but even then, i still take steps to maintain a level of privacy. It's for stupid reasons, I'm admittedly not knowledgeable whatsoever on data privacy. (As in, why is it necessary since we already carry a lot of data collection devices with us as we go around that I know most people dont even think about.) But it makes me just feel better, I guess.
Most of my friends have actually moved away from Firefox to more tailored browsers like opera, which i think is much worse in terms of data protection. (again, uninformed. It's just something I've seen thrown around, feel free to correct me if that's wrong.) At times, it really is quite easy to start thinking like the people highlighted in the post. I'm 22, and have a degree in computer science. There was a module on data security, but it was mostly focussed on data leaks and encryption methods rather than the 'philosophy' on why data protection is important. Even in the final year of uni, people were being quite flippant with it.
It's probably just a cultural shift, as more and more companies collect mass amounts of user data, people gradually get more comfortable with the idea I guess. Especially with gen alpha, who are born into a world where it's just a fact that all companies are actively farming your data. To them, it's not something to be concerned about whatsoever. There was never a time in which they had privacy, especially since they are introduced to technology before they can even speak, write, or remember.
What I've put above is mostly just waffle honestly, but I hope it provides something to someone LMAO.
Edit to add stuff: I guess to make the point more obvious, for younger generations it's because privacy just isn't real for them.
I was messing around with deep learning for time series earlier and my work laptop fans kept going. I was like makes sense, until I checked and the edge browser I had on in the background was hogging all my ram and GPU