Isn’t the title such a common response of people getting judged for not caring about online privacy?
I’ve heard all the different responses (and their different variants):
- “Why would they care about me?/I’m not important to track.”
- I don’t care about privacy.
- What are they really going to do with that information?
- My personal favorite They can’t track me.
When it comes to privacy, I make an effort to keep personal affairs personal, while at the same time having an online presence for my chosen career path only.
- https://github.com/Michaelpalacce
- https://sgenov.dev/
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/%F0%9F%A4%96-stefan-genov-286972a3
To me Social Media is frankly scary and, as I was made aware recently, I consider myself privileged not to have a need to grow it. Oh how happy it makes me, knowing I don’t need to live vicariously through others or depend on their engagement. Most of the things I do are not getting shared with others directly. I don’t harbor desire for others approval.
This is not to say I don’t have any social media, I do, but nothing is actually shared there. Take Facebook as an example. None of my posts are visible anymore. None of my information is publicly accessible. YouTube, no history is being saved, no recommendations, no personalized ads. Reddit, none of my comments or posts are visible. My account is fully private. Google, no tracking settings are enabled, mostly everything is stopped. Heck, I’m the guy who never consents on cookies and will go to the point of manually unchecking all the boxes of I am given the option to.
Do I suffer for this? Yeah, definitely! I don’t get YouTube recommendations, can’t know if I’ve watched something and how much of it, Google doesn’t remember my history, cant’s see what I’ve searched and I can’t fully use some of their services, but I’m happy with that. As a positive to all this, I don’t end up Doomscrolling on YouTube all day.
See, security and privacy removes convenience. You will be inconvenienced the more secure you wish to be. And companies will do everything they can to make sure you are being tracked if possible as that earns them money.
And here is where we are getting to the crux of the matter. Just how much are you worth it. I’m really not going to go into much detail about how ads are calculated as it’s not an exact science and everyone’s situation is different, but companies will pay a lot of money to show the ads to the right audience. Well, I don’t want to be that audience. I don’t want reddit, Google and meta to make money out of me. I want to be the random guy they send a random ad to because the seller didn’t have a big budget. And I want nobody to win in this situation. I get an ad I won’t click, the ad platform loses from sending the wrong ad to the wrong person and the seller is not happy cause they paid for nothing.
I don’t even want to talk about the threat of this. Evil individuals can use the data that is freely available to them to perform social engineering attacks, identify theft as well as blackmail you.
I get Peace Of Mind from the measures I’ve taken. My data is not public, not being used and sold and I don’t have to worry my private life is being made public for the sick enjoyment of the snakes on social media.
So, who cares for your data? Ad sellers do. What if they track you? They are milking money from you, brainwashing you in staying on their platform. Are you important? No, but you earn money for them.
I don’t want my data fully controlled and sold by massive capitalist corporations and neither should you. At the end of the day, if you don’t care for privacy, let yourself be exploited! Nobody can help with that.