| I used to engage with this topic a lot and still orient my life around minimizing the scope of digital access to my life. The outcomes are great - I read books more often, and I’m less on my phone bc my phone is largely bricked outside of Signal. That said, our laws represent our values. We have a complete lack of tangible privacy laws and any ability to enforce them, and that doesn’t seem to be changing despite decades of these calls. GDPR delete requests are a joke because of the 17 marketing excel sheets with user exports floating around and forgotten in downloads folder that every tech company with user data has in some form. Western culture, in its current form, doesn’t value privacy. It’s nuking privacy bc of tech-enabled capitalism and a decentralized mess of efforts to hit OKRs, love of social media by users, making that next VC raise, do that compliance check on user origin. Everything about tech can’t function without that stream of user data. Every company is about tech now. Every company can’t function in its current profit mode without user data. I’ve benefited greatly from capitalism, so I don’t get too bent out of shape. But you have to spend just one quarter with access to user-facing logs to know privacy is a lost cause, unless there is a significant reevaluation of tech regulations, and then you’d need the actual hammer-drop EPA in new 1970z style regulations. I don’t think we’ll get it. So my conclusion is to protect yourself as able and otherwise ride the wave into what’s next. |