Hi, my name is not convexer and this is my garbage site. I created this site
because I wanted a place where I could be my full & terrible self without
worrying too hard about making a positive impression.
Topics of interest include personal shit, gender politics, regular politics,
and the modern workplace. I don’t really proofread my posts, so let me know if
I say anything that’s just wrong.
“If I have peed farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
:
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"?
