[lurker_jMckQT99]

I guarantee that you will. That is a nightmare that you can not choose to avoid unless you are willing to sacrifice your social life.

Remember how raising awareness about smartphones, always on microphones, closed source communication services/apps worked? I do not.

I run an Android (Google free) smartphone with a custom ROM, only use free software apps on it.

How does it help when I am surrounded by people using these kind of technologies (privacy violating ones)? I does not. How will it help when everyone will have his/her personal assistant (robot, drone, smart wearable, smart-thing, whatever) and you (and I) won't? It will not.

None of my friends, family, colleagues (even the security/privacy aware engineers) bother. Some of them because they do not have the technical knowledge to do so, most of them because they do not want to sacrifice any bit of convenience/comfort (and maybe rightfully so, I am not judging them - life is short, I do get that people do not want to waste precious time maintaining arcane infra, devices, config,... themselves).

I am a privacy and free software advocate and an engineer; whenever I can (and when there is a tiny bit of will on their side or when I have lever), I try to get people off surveillance/ad-backed companies services.

It rarely works or lasts. Sometimes it does though so it is worth (to me) keep on trying.

It generally works or lasts when I have lever: I manage various sports team, only share schedules etc via Signal ; family wants to get pictures from me, I will only share the link (to my Nextcloud instance) or photos themselves via Signal, etc.

Sometimes it sticks with people because it's close enough to whatsapp/messenger/whatever if most (all) of their contacts are their. But as soon as you have that one person that will not or can not install Signal, alternatives groups get created on whatsapp/messenger/whatever.

Overcoming the network effect is tremendously hard to borderline impossible.

Believing that you can escape it is a fallacy. It does not mean that is not worth fight for our rights, but believing that you can escape it altogether (without becoming and hermit) would be setting, I believe, an unachievable goal (with all the psychological impact that it can/will have).

Edit: fixed typos

[asdff]

Think about it in terms of what is rational. If there were serious costs to having your data leaked out like this people would rationally have a bit more trepidation. On the other hand, we are in the era where everyone by now has probably been pwned a half dozen times or more, to no effect usually on your real life. You might get disgusted that instagram watches what you watch to serve you more of that stuff and keep you on longer, other people love that sort of content optimization, I literally hear them gloat how their social media content feeds at this point have been so perfectly honed to show them whatever hobbies or sports they are interested in. Take a picture and it pushes to 5 services and people love that. Having an app already pull your contacts for you and match them up to existing users is great in the eyes of most people.

You are right that on the one hand these things could be used for really bad purposes, but they are pretty benign. Now if you start going "well social media posts can influence elections," sure, but so can TV, newspapers, the radio, a banner hauled by a prop plane, whatever, not like anythings changed. If anything its a safer environment for combating a slip to fascism now vs in the mid century when there were like three channels on TV and a handful of radio programs carefully regulated by the FCC and that's all the free flow of info you have short of smuggling the printed word like its the 1400s.

Given all of this, I can't really blame people for accepting the game they didn't create for how it is and gleaming convenience from it. Take smartphones out of the equation, take the internet out, take out computers, and our present dystopia is still functionally the same.