This is short sighted. Browsers live and die on their performance benchmarks and security track records. Like it or don’t, “nobody but tech geeks” actually care about privacy.
The problem is that of understanding, and of finding cause and effect.
I know a few people who have been victims of identity theft. After hearing their stories, it was clear to me that it would not have happened if companies weren't tracking them and selling their personal data left and right.
But it's hard to make that connection. People seem to accept identity theft as "something that just happens sometimes", even though it makes them very angry, frustrated, anxious, and eats up a lot of time and sometimes money. I think they do this because it's hard to point to one culprit as the cause, and so it feels like an intractable problem.
If people could actually understand that their lack of privacy protections on the internet (and elsewhere) is one of the main factors in enabling things like identity theft, there would be more people who would affirmatively care about privacy.
I'm not sure how to get people to make that intuitive leap on a large enough scale for it to matter, though. You're very right that people mainly care about browser performance (I'd even argue they don't care about security that much, though certainly more than they care about privacy); I know several people who definitely know better and understand privacy issues on the internet, but still use Chrome because "Firefox is slow on macOS" or something.
> But it's hard to make that connection. People seem to accept identity theft as "something that just happens sometimes"
A little like the way people talk about "cyber warfare".
In real warfare, the enemy can attack your forces no matter what you do.
In cyber warfare, you can build impenetrable defences. The only way the enemy can attack you successfully is if you make a mistake.
This kind of thinking IMO is perpetuated by absurd tv shows where e.g McGee can hack into any computer system by tapping on his keyboard for a few seconds.
It's harmless on TV, but in the real world it leads to complacency about security. People saying"poor Equifax, they were attacked" instead of "Equifax's security was a joke, and they left their system wide open for anyone to plunder".
I know a few people who have been victims of identity theft. After hearing their stories, it was clear to me that it would not have happened if companies weren't tracking them and selling their personal data left and right.
But it's hard to make that connection. People seem to accept identity theft as "something that just happens sometimes", even though it makes them very angry, frustrated, anxious, and eats up a lot of time and sometimes money. I think they do this because it's hard to point to one culprit as the cause, and so it feels like an intractable problem.
If people could actually understand that their lack of privacy protections on the internet (and elsewhere) is one of the main factors in enabling things like identity theft, there would be more people who would affirmatively care about privacy.
I'm not sure how to get people to make that intuitive leap on a large enough scale for it to matter, though. You're very right that people mainly care about browser performance (I'd even argue they don't care about security that much, though certainly more than they care about privacy); I know several people who definitely know better and understand privacy issues on the internet, but still use Chrome because "Firefox is slow on macOS" or something.