Privacy is a self-evident and basic human right, like freedom of expression. The principle of this is already acknowledged in law. For example, reading snail mail is very illegal, and nobody questions what harm would come from someone reading Grandmas "merry christmas" letter to you. It is only on the internet that violations of this right are turned a blind eye to, because of regulatory capture and government inertia. Regulators are slowly catching up (see GDPR) but in the meanwhile users are forced to take matters into their own hands.
The data being collected is valuable, evidenced by the fact that an entire industry exists for it. It is collected without the users' consent (beyond the sham of "by using this website you agree to our terms" - by the way, legally speaking individuals cannot agree to give up their rights). The users are not compensated for the valuable information that is harvested from them.
Lastly, many online service providers are cavalier with the security of this data. It is freely shared with hostile state actors (not necessarily western ones), predatory commercial third parties (spammers), and actual criminals. Due to lax security, criminals often gain access to this data and use it for identity theft, phishing and other fraud. People compile it in "social media background check" databases which exposes individuals, without their consent, to stalkers.
There's not enough space in a comment to go over every single instance of privacy violations leading to serious consequences for users, such as those you claim do not exist, so to anyone interested I would recommend doing a web search on privacy related topics.
So nothing; nothing actually happened, and so now we must invent moral outrage to sustain the hate cycle.
Aren’t you exhausted by all of this? Why continue to participate in the flywheel when you can otherwise simply reap the myriad benefits that come with a more connected society?
It just seems like some folks prefer constantly being upset…
The data being collected is valuable, evidenced by the fact that an entire industry exists for it. It is collected without the users' consent (beyond the sham of "by using this website you agree to our terms" - by the way, legally speaking individuals cannot agree to give up their rights). The users are not compensated for the valuable information that is harvested from them.
Lastly, many online service providers are cavalier with the security of this data. It is freely shared with hostile state actors (not necessarily western ones), predatory commercial third parties (spammers), and actual criminals. Due to lax security, criminals often gain access to this data and use it for identity theft, phishing and other fraud. People compile it in "social media background check" databases which exposes individuals, without their consent, to stalkers.
There's not enough space in a comment to go over every single instance of privacy violations leading to serious consequences for users, such as those you claim do not exist, so to anyone interested I would recommend doing a web search on privacy related topics.