[melomal]

This literally is the divide between HN types and everyday individuals.

The latter pays little attention because they generally do not care whilst HN will debate and suggest endless fixes to the problem - which are always technically more difficult or cumbersome. This is why people buy Apple products on each iteration, religiously for some, because they want it to work, be pretty and the desire of everyone.

The UK has been well known for their love of CCTV and yet crimes still go unpunished and people don't get caught.

[Santosh83]

I wouldn't say ordinary people "do not care". To some extent, even ordinary people know that the mega tech empires concentrate too much power and data. Popular media hasn't completely failed to report on stuff like FB fiascos, privacy leaks and so on. Many more people are aware than HNers might imagine. But viable solutions are not there. As you point out, alternatives are workable only to the technically inclined, which means they might as well not exist. To be sure there are alternatives which swap one silo for another, but truly private options are too cumbersome to make inroads into mainstream, and they never will, if they continue to remain so fiddly. Of course the other side of this is legislation and regulations but even here the transnational nature of these corps allow them to work around even progressive national laws, and the latter are rare enough, with most politicians bought off one way or another.