I also think about this sometimes. On the one hand, I have a natural instinct to give away as little personal data as I can, and it intuitively makes sense to me that it’s in your favour to keep as much private as possible; I assume many of us here feel the same way. But on the other hand, it takes a lot of energy to keep track of all the data that you leak, and often you have to give up better tools or workflows for a small perceived privacy gain.
Does this matter? Even if I do everything “right”, nobody around me does it. I can try to keep my shopping preferences and my searches private, but there is so much to gather from everyone else who doesn’t care about this that my efforts are very likely in vain. Even without my cookies, if you have as much data as a big tracker does, you can definitely make pretty good assumptions about what I like.
The response I usually see to this is that if everybody cared about privacy, then the picture would be different. But I’ve been reading exactly the same argument about using Firefox for the last ~15 years, and look where the Firefox share of the market is now…
Does this matter? Even if I do everything “right”, nobody around me does it. I can try to keep my shopping preferences and my searches private, but there is so much to gather from everyone else who doesn’t care about this that my efforts are very likely in vain. Even without my cookies, if you have as much data as a big tracker does, you can definitely make pretty good assumptions about what I like.
The response I usually see to this is that if everybody cared about privacy, then the picture would be different. But I’ve been reading exactly the same argument about using Firefox for the last ~15 years, and look where the Firefox share of the market is now…