I’ve come to realize most of the privacy hawk arguments are based on imagined risks, and the average privacy enthusiast is an ideologically driven idealist. What is the end goal beyond pumping one’s ego?

Especially internet privacy hawks are the worst. It just doesn’t really matter at all. Unless you are all cash, off the grid, no phone or bank account etc, you will leave a huge trail. Instagram figuring out I like basketball is the least of my worries.

Haha yes! People assume data brokers “know” a lot about a person, but really it’s fuzzy signals. It is far from a crystal ball or a perfect record of every website you’ve ever visited, etc…

I’ve kind of come full circle on all this to where I no longer care. The slippery slope arguments are largely hypothetical imo…Google knows some stuff about me and attempts to show me ads, the vast majority of which I block, so what?

I pay taxes, have a social security number, my bank and credit card companies know my purchase history, the credit bureaus know my mortgage payment and lender, etc…

The myth of an off the grid life is exactly that, a myth. And what does it achieve for you other than some vague sense of idealistic pride?

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. If big companies want to give them money in an attempt at to get me to pay attention to them then so be it, let them finance it. Imagine if only those who could afford to pay could use these tools.

Sure, and an earache can be nothing or a symptom of a brain tumor. That’s the problem with a bunch of people self diagnosing based on WebMD or memes.

Show this comic to 100 people and almost all will think they’re in the blue zone.

This is like those ADHD memes which just list every one of life’s inconveniences or challenges as some kind of “symptom.”

Everyone has these feelings, it’s not a curse, it’s just life.