: Privacy nihilism
I have this friend who is like, generally concerned about privacy in the macro but has not taken any actual steps to increase her digital privacy threshold in the micro, e.g. using a fake phone number for grocery store loyalty cards or opting out of pointless data-sharing agreements or rejecting cookies or what have you.
I forget what the example was that we were discussing yesterday but she said something like, "Yeah, it kinda sucks that they use that info to form a digital profile of you, and I would love to opt out, but at the same time it takes effort to do so, and I am quite confident that even if I opted out they could get the same data from somewhere else, so it's really just wasted effort."
I wasn't really sure what to say to this. This post kinda sucks because I can't remember the particular example, but her point actually made perfect sense--it really was data that could be trivially scraped from some other source or credit card thing or what have you. So I had to sort of concede the point.
Have any of you encountered this kind of privacy nihilism before--and perhaps come up with an argument against it better than "Still, you gotta have principles"?