[dasil003]

It's crazy where the Overton window is that no one gives a shit about privacy issues unless they tie into politics somehow, and government trying to protect citizens' privacy by means of laws with actual teeth (read: fines) is equated to physical violence.

Ad tech has taken full carte blanche for long enough. If you actually dig into GDPR you find that it's quite reasonable, far better than the cookie law and other earlier iterations that fundamentally misunderstood technology.

[superkuh]

Oh, I care a lot about privacy. Because of that I made many choices to never even start using services like Facebook or carry a cell phone with me. I also run white-list only javascript in browser and host all my own services (web/mail/voice chat/etc). These things have made it harder to stay involved with friends, harder to use the web, but it was my choice and the right one.

The idea that people have to be protected from themselves and their choices is at the heart of GDPR. It prevents people from making the correct choice of not using services you disagree with and keeps those services profiting and ever more centralized.

But digging even deeper, there's this delusion that your usage patterns of someone elses' property are yours and to me it seems crazy. You wouldn't say that physical grocery stores cannot keep track of who enters their premises and what they bought (or how long their phone SSID was in range of $x aisle). Or that they should be fined, and have those fined backed up with government violence, if someone demanded the grocer delete the data.

[_b8r0]

> Because of that I made many choices to never even start using services like Facebook or carry a cell phone with me.

Yet services like Facebook will have a shadow profile for you from data built up through abusing access to other peoples' systems.