To me, privacy is first and foremost protection. That's from my upbringing, I guess. It's hard to argue with anything other to people who don't seem like they care about their privacy at all - and I get it, some people just don't care and trust their government etc. What else would you bring up to these people other than the bad things that have already happened due to less privacy than possible?
You could try bringing up relevant situations where a breach of privacy was the proximate cause of a systemic negative consequence on a large scale, rather than irrelevant-but-also-terrible things that weren't directly caused by a lack of privacy.
You mean like when the KGB murdered my grandparent based on class origin and corporation ownership? Or the time when the Gestapo did the same to my great-grandparent, also based on ownership of the same corporation?
To me, it seems like there are much longer periods of problems than periods of peaceful life. Only 30 years out of the last 100 were in lived in relative freedom here, and still excesses are happening today. Protect yourselves people. Nobody will return your health and life back once an excess happens to you.
Again, I get that bad things happen, but none of what you've brought up would have been prevented with better privacy in practice. It's well beyond "privacy" to believe that ownership of a corporation should be hidden information, that'd be exceedingly easy to abuse.
I'm sorry those things happened to your family, but they're not relevant to a modern privacy conversation.
> You could try bringing up relevant situations where a breach of privacy was the proximate cause of a systemic negative consequence on a large scale
The US Government directly used census data to target families and neighborhoods to send to internment camps within living memory.
Something ongoing: prosecutions are currently underway to parties who have abortions or assist in abortions based off of private correspondences such as texting, calling, or facebook messages.
So your most recent widespread example is 80+ years ago, and then a very tiny hypothetical set of lawsuits that have not been filed (zero prosecutions are "under way")?
A guy who cares about evaluating the likelihood and significance of an event taking place.
I'm not value judging this, I'm just trying to determine if it's worth reacting to, and based on the number of folks effected, the severity of the impact, and the frequency, privacy violations seem pretty minor overall as a threat, not worth considering within my personal attack surface.
You're right, they didn't have an example of their exact situation, so they should have felt perfectly safe. They could see that pogroms happened in other places, to other people, a long time ago, obviously not even relevant in hypermodern civilized 1930s Germany.
I'm glad you recognize how fundamentally different the world is today than how it was in the 1930s, because not realizing that would probably confuse the hell out of you a lot of the time.
Anyways, something like 40% of the EU citizens lived through communism, so it's not exactly unusual.