I know people who hate this reality because they feel it is up to the customer to "decide" whether …

> This argument, "People don't really care about <x> ...", is not so much an argument as it is a rationalization for amoral or simply bad behavior on the part of the seller/supplier. It's worse than that. It's adversarial propaganda. People actually do care about privacy, but they also care about other things, and they don't always know about privacy. If Amazon tells you that they're recording what you say at all, it's buried in a hundred page ToS that nobody reads, and then what they do with the information isn't even clearly specified. If people understood that they're using it to determine which products to show you so you're more likely to buy the ones with higher margins, and that's costing you $1200/year, people would care about that, but they don't even realize it's happening. If the market is consolidated into two companies and they're both invading your privacy, or there is one …

"People are naturally ambivalent" is a statement of fact, not an argument. What confuses me is that you imply that you agree it's true. After all, if people did care they wouldn't need advocates to care for them. What's more, we don't want to care about things. In fact a lot of pain we are experiencing now is precisely that we are being forced to care about things we haven't had to for decades, arguably centuries. It sucks. Life is better when the plumbing "just works" precisely because then we don't have to care about it and can focus on other more interesting parts of life. There has been a critical breakdown in the trust people have in the experts that advocate for them. The damage started with a flurry of self-inflicted wounds and then those wounds were mercilessly exploited by those seeking tactical advantage. What makes this especially evil is that these mercinaries use people's na…

>This argument, "People don't really care about <x> ...", That may definitely be the case sometimes, but I certainly don't mean it like that. By normal person standards, I'm pretty extreme about privacy: no social media, (no, HN doesn't count) pihole, ublock+custom lists, noscript, as few services as possible, frozen credit, DNS resolver rather than a single 3rd party service, etc. I strongly lament the lack of interest in privacy. The point of my statement is that people can't even be bothered to care about privacy when it costs them nothing. Given this, I can't imagine them actually caring about privacy when it actually inconveniences them. There's just no chance of it. I don't want things to be that way, but it's clear there's nothing I can do about it. Between pornography ID laws, anti-bot mitigations on websites, and the rise of smart phones + apps, it seems pretty clear that the de…

> It is the rationale for the existence of regulation by government ... including the War on Drugs. We should be very cautious about asserting our value system over the value system of other people who are customers of these tools, lest the end result is a situation where people are no happier (and not much safer).