I got key-logged by an abusive parent when I was 14. If that doesn’t make you take digital privacy and security seriously, nothing else will.

I hate ads.

PRISM, the American empire mass espionage program

I thought I was doing great protecting my information. Then a former employer was hacked and everything is out there including my mother's maiden name.

But hey I got one year of credit monitoring for free... helpful when my credit has been locked since forever....

Initally Facebook, but then also Google and Microsoft.

Piracy

I've been online since the early 90s, when it was just understood that there were risks, so you had to protect yourself. So it's not so much that I got into internet privacy as that I've never done things any other way.

The only thing that's really changed is that I've had to shift more from passively protecting myself to actively protecting myself, since corporate and government shitstains are constantly scheming to destroy our privacy in order to expand and protect their own wealth, power and privilege.

Snowden

Data breaches and just in general, what every company seemingly knows about me even if I never used their products, and how much reach those companies have on you that's just plain inescapable like health insurance and banks?

Do I really care that Banana Co knows I like bananas? No. Do I care that my health insurance could deny a claim based on what I purchase at the grocery store? Absolutely. Companies use that data to serve their interests first. Especially when it comes to endangered rights like LGBTQ+, people of color and abortion rights, it makes it easy to feed all that data in an opaque AI black box and discriminate against you, with no way to prove it and no legal recourse.

Especially true with for example, Jews during Nazi germany, or right now anti-war russians in Russia. Lack of privacy can be plain dangerous.

Common sense.

I wanted the freedom of Android/Linux, then privacy was easy

Advertisements and how media tends to treats people like they're stupid

If I'm being honest the switch from Reddit to Lemmy and this instance...

Data breaches where my information was leaked and used against me. I didn't know any better unfortunately at the time.

Tech -> Raspberry Pi -> Linux -> New PC -> Mining Crypto -> Monero -> Privacy

I was actually praising Google for some reason when I was still in elementary school. I discovered Firefox, uBlock Origin and other stuff then got into privacy at the age of 14.

Big tech made me do it. I wish it were the standard procedure.

Windows 10

Performance boost. Ads take up bandwidth and I wanted faster shit. I use a pihole bc it's like a real wifi booster. Who cares about ads?

Always been reasonably aware, but what made me cut as much closed source and mainstream stuff as possible was the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica Scandal.

Working at an online video ad server, which was subsequently acquired by Kabletown, with a K.

because i hate injustice, and one day figured that surveillance enables imbalance of power, therefore injustice.

My IT teacher from high school put a major emphasis on online privacy.

He thinks the internet is a major threat to individual freedom and while it brings benefits, the negative effects are too big for him.

While I don't agree with the last statement, I do think privacy is very much under attack nowadays and while I am not very concerned what other people and corporations know about me, I still care about privacy simply because I have the right to do so and because if I don't pay attention, a dozen different trackers will know what I have done without me granting permission.

Corporations basically take advantage of people and give nothing in return and that is bad imo.

In part because some of my education research led me into looking at how data was being used by social media and big tech and led me to a greater understanding of just how much was being collected and how it was being shared and used.

After learning about the landscape of data collection, I decided I wanted to minimize my part in it.

From doing network security, configuring server OS and software for security and privilege seperation, it seemed privacy was a natural growth out of doing system and network security.

I’ve known for the lack of privacy online for a while but joining lemmy really made me change the way I browse the Internet. I switched to Firefox with unlock origin, started to use a password manager with randomly generated passwords and got more conscious about my internet habits overall.

The uncovering of the magnitudes of the privacy violations of PRISM around 2013.

I started trying to replace closed source apps with open source apps because I liked Godot more than Unity and it was open source and decided to change everything to a Foss alternative

A combination of over-involved parents when I was younger, and reading about human rights abuses later on. I think I first started reading about personal privacy stuff after there were protests in some part of the world, and then the government tracked down those talking about it online in order to arrest and torture them. People were posting urgently about how they could protect themselves and I didn't know what to say

the fucking ads. they spooked me as hell.

I was originally just against censorship. I turned to DDG instead of Google because I wanted more open and free search results. That's where it all started.