There is this common narrative I see all the time, implying that we as individuals are empowered to choose and manifest our own destiny, and this comes up often in privacy discussions.
Don’t like Facebook’s privacy nightmares? Just don’t use Facebook!
Don’t like personalized ads? I remember a popular post on reddit saying “if your ad interrupts my YouTube video, I will hate your product”.
Don’t like Google chrome hegemony? Just use Firefox!
And while I agree that we should strive to do that, the battle doesn’t end here. Facebook has shadow accounts for people who never signed up. Google chrome keeps it’s hegemony despite people on the Internet advocating Firefox day and night. And ads continue to be extremely profitable despite you “hating the product” because it interrupted your YouTube video.
Even worse: even if you “hate the product”, you now already know it. You now know they product exists, and possibly whatever they wanted you to know about it. The reality is that these companies own your eyes. They control what shows up on your screen. And even if you hate it, they control what you end up learning.
the reality is that our individual resistance is very far from enough
I am not saying it is completely futile. It is a step in the right direction. But the only effective solution is organized action. We, alone, cannot achieve much. Unless we organize our resistance against privacy violations, we will continue to live through this privacy nightmare.
This was clearly spelled out - quite by mistake - by one of the very sumbitches stealing our privacy all the way back in 1999:
https://www.wired.com/1999/01/sun-on-privacy-get-over-it/
The sumbitches have since learned to work quietly and boil us frogs slowly. But they sure have been busy since 1999.
When I heard Scott McNealy utter that obscene statement back then, I laughed and I remember telling a coworker “That guy is off his goddamn mind”. A decade later, I understood that he actually let slip something we should have paid a lot more attention to. But it was already much too late.