It doesn’t have to be black and white. As many comments have already mentioned, it all depends on your threat model. Sure, it’s literally impossible to be completely private or anonymous unless you never go online and live like a hermit, but that doesn’t mean you can’t take steps to minimize what personal information companies get from you. You can still care about your private data while at the same time not sacrificing convenience.

I’ve kind of come full circle on all this to where I no longer care.

I'm at a similar point. I saw how people who don't think about privacy handle the world and realized its not so bad.

In the end its all datamining for targeted ads, which only works if I can see the ads they're trying to target me with.

It also helped that I had a job directly working with the kind of data I worked so hard to block and saw both how unreliable the data was, and how much companies struggle to actually put that data to use

Yeah, so what ?

Do you know how Gnu / Linux makes money ?

At some point it is not about individuals but big corporations that need their services, and they buy them.

They should have built their business model as per their financial requirements from the outset then, if that was the problem for them.

But that should not justify or excuse them for doing things that are immoral and unethical.

Sounds more like a greedy approach than anything.

If I was an ethical and moral CEO of Google, and sought it costly to maintain such a huge infrastructure for millions of people around the world that are using their services freely, I would have made measures to shut them down or close them, instead of maliciously inserting things and harvesting stuff from them.

Then if they have such data, then they should be held accountable and responsible in the future for any damages as a result of their work processes, and that happened many times historically speaking. And any crime that happens, they either offer evidence or be complicit to hiding fugitives. Which alone is a process that will cost them alot, just having to do it, and cooperate w them any governmental party.

If I get in trouble in the future, I sure would love to have Google assist me in proving that I was innocent, by providing evidence through data that it has. But would they be willing to do so?

This is very interesting in a way to think about, as it shows where their weakness lies in their business model, and where they are strong.

But it goes to show how monopolistic they are, and, if anything, neglectful to basic human rights. Where I'm from, privacy is a human right. So there are many dimensions to take into consideration here - but ultimately they are only a small aspect of this whole complex dimension to boot.

Ultimately, it is their fault for not setting up their business model to meet up with their own financial requirements. And not ours.

Google provides tremendous utility to the world essentially for free; its search engine, maps, mail client apps, browser, etc. are tools billions of people use every day. How do they maintain a global network of data centers and localize their products to hundreds of languages…none of that is free.

👢👅

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Pretty much this. I get the "you don't know what the bad guys will criminalize next" argument, but I have a hard time seeing it, when it comes to my browsing patterns.