I recently decided to make my life slightly harder by starting to care about my privacy, and I think you should too.
From the time that I was little I remember that whet I first started getting into tech and the internet I was always skeptical about giving away any real information about me. When I finally decided to create a facebook account, which I did very late compared to peers and needed some persuasion, I only used fake data. I gave a made up name and random stock photo as my profile picture. That hesitation sadly slowly disappeared. Now facebook knows everything about me. How I look, what I like, who my friends are, how I sound, how I talk etc. I requested that all my data was deleted but I don't trust them to have done that. Now a bored fb employee or Zucc can open the file with my name and read it. Worse they can and probably already have sold my data to 3rd parties or hackers have already gotten hold of it. This scares me.
Many trust big corporations with their data. Those corpos know more about you than even your mother and the closest of friends, and whatever their privacy policies might say there's a very high change they are sharing your data with others for profit. Law enforcement can easily learn everything about you by just asking a few companies. That's not good however because some say you can be jailed for 3 felonies per week just by what you post on social media. With the data you give you can be easily manipulated. If you think that you won't be influenced then you are very very wrong.
But I have nothing to hide you might say. This is the most popular argument against privacy which is in many ways erroneous. Firstly you do have something to hide. If you don't then please go ahead and email me your bank account address and password, all your dirty secrets, your photos and all info about you. I have said many things to some that I wouldn't like for others to know about, and I'm sure that that's true for everybody. Secondly even if you don't have anything to hide, privacy is still important, that's why you have curtains and doors in your house. When I'm taking a dump I'm not hiding it, I just want my privacy that's why I shut the door. Thirdly others care about privacy because it's a basic human right even if you don't. Let's say you have nothing to say, shouldn't you still have freedom of speech? Same logic. In addition there are certain groups of people for which privacy is a matter of life or death. Whistle-blowers, activists, journalists and protesters come a step closer to death when we surrender our privacy for the reason that we make it harder for them to keep theirs.
Other arguments that recently sprung up are terrorism, pedophilia, domestic violence etc. Don't be fooled however that's just a colorful packaging for surveillance. Take the recent example of apple's announcement for a CSAM detection system which would scan all your photos for known pedophilia. I had found a nice site with a very nice metaphor for it which sadly I can't find(finally found it after 3 months, go read it here it's better than my summary of it). Here's about how it went. Imagine the FBI decided that in order to reduce abuse of children, surveillance cameras where to be installed in every American home without leaving any blind spots, calming you down by saying that if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to worry about. Camera feeds would be checked for child abuse and if anything was detected you would go to jail. That's what apple is doing with your phone. I don't know about you but I don't like that one bit however much it might help prevent abuse. Many say that there's no evidence surveillance even helps, with evidence supporting that claim. In addition it's way too easy to use surveillance in an abusive manner I would even say that it's impossible to have surveillance that's not used abusively
And corpos selling your data is not a lie, take a look at this Zoom lies about encryption and sends data to facebooks. No discord is not any better Discord - Spyware Watchdog. For more on discord here. People have been killed because apps sold their users' data.
It's a basic human right that everyone wants to exterminate.