> I don't agree with this characterization - it's too willful. To me, it seems more like a helpless coping mechanism. Since they "overestimate the degree to whi

> I don't agree with this characterization - it's too willful. To me, it seems more like a helpless coping mechanism. Since they "overestimate the degree to which their privacy is compromised", they resign themselves to not being able to do anything to protect their own privacy. The phone is listening to them, the satellites are tracking them [0], websites are recording them - basically every electronic device they encounter is not under their control. Their privacy is already gone. I don't doubt that some contingent of the market feels this way, but I'm positing the existence of a large section of the market that truly doesn't really care that much about privacy. There's a reason that privacy advocates spend so much time arguing against "if you're doing nothing wrong, privacy doesn't matter", and it's because so many see big institutions (tech cos, banks, gov't) as detached institutions that for the most part do the right thing. It's the same reason that most people don't have a coherent sense of government's monopoly on legitimate violence and coercion: instead of grappling with the nuances and trade-offs of this bargain, it's easier to just model them as "the good guys". Naturally, I'm going off of my perception here, as there aren't well-defined statistics that would give us a more reliable sense of the attitudes towards privacy that affect (or don't affect) people's purchase decisions. But a high enough proportion of my non-tech-employee acquaintances are unbothered by privacy concerns that I have to at least acknowledge that they likely represent a non-trivial segment of the market. > they're still ultimately powerless to change anything. This doesn't comport with my experience with these people. One finds niche cases here and there where the trade-off for privacy/autonomy provides a pretty decent ROI. I've occasionally been asked about some of these decisions of mine. In those conversations, the people I'm talking about don't look at these trade-offs and decide that the effort isn't worth the privacy benefit: they hear that the benefit is privacy and immediately go "oh this isn't relevant to me".