What strikes me as strange is the different levels of scrutiny the web gets vs. real life. If we walk outside of our house then we're likely on camera, potenti

What strikes me as strange is the different levels of scrutiny the web gets vs. real life. If we walk outside of our house then we're likely on camera, potentially with facial recognition. Cameras will track our cars' license plates. Cellular networks know where our phone is at all times. Our payment card networks and the stores we shop at gather data on what we buy. This is effectively public information because normal everyday citizens can just look around and see us and recognize us and what we're doing. I assume every action I take is probably observed and logged by someone. Those folks share the information with their business partners. This has been going on since at least the 1980s to various extents; there isn't a way to opt out of participating in public spaces unless one is particularly wealthy, and then the risk is becoming a celebrity and losing even more privacy. If anything, the web is slightly less intrusive despite occurring in public (I argue that the Internet is just as public as any real public space; we rely on third-parties to forward all our traffic. We use TLS if we want to hide the details of what we're doing). It's not technically us being tracked but our devices and we can wipe them, block javascript or cookies or network requests, etc. Maybe tracking is more effective for being fully automated and granular, but I'm not sure if that's worse from a privacy point of view. I think collectively we need to decide whether we want more privacy or anonymity. Full anonymity is nearly impossible to achieve but would mean that no matter where we went or bought or did no one else would be the wiser. Presumably we'd only see shadowy hooded figures in public so that even we had no idea who they were. It sounds draconian in the other direction. Privacy, to me, is a polite fiction that we won't individually bother each other by using all the information we know about each other. For the most part this is already done in real life and the web. Companies don't wholesale dump/sell every piece of data they collect about us; they aggregate and categorize it. This is the middle ground of privacy where people mostly mind their own business but don't blind themselves to trends and patterns of behavior occurring in public.