[WorldMaker]

You may be right that privacy may not matter any more, and/or that the battle for privacy itself is already lost.

To provide an alternative approach to consider, there's always the questions of "qui bono?" and "quis custodiet ipsos custodes?". (There's are quite old questions, if the fact that they are often served in Latin wasn't a dead giveaway.) "Who benefits?" and "who observes the observers?"

Are you getting enough value from people using your private information?

Do you know who is using your private information? Who is keeping them honest/lawful/good?

Those are very tough questions, and a lot of the responses here certainly will tell you that the answers aren't in your favor. Though that's for you to judge, you may be benefitting enough from your Google services and social media, that maybe that's a fair trade-off for you. You may feel that market controls, capitalism, shareholders, may hold enough interest in keeping corporate entities accountable that you aren't worried what they are doing with your private information. That's a perfectly acceptable stance. It's largely the default stance these days, which is why so many posts are so fervently pro-privacy, because that's the stance that needs the most defending.

Here's the thing though, even if you agree that maybe privacy is an intangible benefit that is already "lost" and not coming back, there are still interesting answers to "qui bono?" and "quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" that push towards the opposite direction: fighting for less privacy overall, but more transparency/accountability.

"Who benefits?" Why should Google make so much money selling advertisers to you personally? Why not disintermediate that situation and sell yourself directly to advertisers?

"Who observes the observers?" Who is it checking that Google is only using your private information for ads? Can you demand that Google explain everything they do with your private information, including when and how it gets "anonymized" or "aggregated" into other metrics? How much of your privacy data goes through open source code that you can evaluate for yourself? Can you access the foundations of their machine learning algorithms and help find biases as a user, as a general part of the "crowd", without being an employee or government auditor?

One possible demand in a surveillance state is to dismantle the surveillance, and if privacy is already lost, that's a doomed battle. The other possible demand is sousveillance: "I should be able to watch you back."

A good book of essays on the subject, if you want to explore the idea further: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society

[atomicnumber1]

You make a very compelling argument. I'm also wondering, that yes, currently our interests are aligned (privacy intrusion for value), what if they're no longer aligned?, Or what if they're compromised? Well, I'm screwed then (as others have outlined).

[WorldMaker]

Sousveillance is a useful goal because it would provide greater opportunity to know when your interests are no longer aligned. Right now a company may publish a privacy policy and say one thing about their interests, but do another and not admit to it. An authority bigger than them might hold them accountable (governments, shareholders), but what if users could be their own watchdogs?

As for compromises, typically the assumptions in Transparency situations is that the damage is mitigated if it was already transparent (everyone already knows, or already has some other way to access that data, so compromise is less of a big deal). Admittedly, there's a lot of cultural hurdles involved to make everything transparent, including "deweaponizing" a lot of people's secrets/getting used to the fact that everyone probably has skeletons in their closet and to stop using that against each other.

I'm not even sure that full transparency could work in the real world [1], but starting from the assumption that privacy is dead anyway, transparency options seem some of the best alternatives to pursue (instead of trying to put all the monsters back into Pandora's box, let's try for hope and compromise).

[1] An interesting argument is that full transparency was the actual state of early tribal humankind. Gossip networks held tribes together. Everyone knew everyone's else's business, just because of human social dynamics and the way that we know tight-knit communities work. From that perspective privacy is a "modern" thing, and possibly even a fluke of modern civilization, though certainly many here would classify it a feature more than a bug.