I’ll preface it with being a non-sexual nudist and also someone who doesn’t and has never used person-oriented social media. I don’t care about the “privacy concerns” at all in the slightest and find it funny. Especially when people obsessed with privacy try to convert me. I always delete my accounts everywhere I leave because I don’t want to have them host useless data and I’m generally very “e-clean” and don’t keep any files I don’t need-need on my PC or cloud drives either. What drove me off Reddit is literaly nazis. I moved to Germany to avoid homelessness in Ireland and since I don’t speak German, choosing an English speaking sub for the country came naturally. I used it for months but lately the amount of people speaking of how “ethnical Germans” cannot do wrong and how all bad stuff are done by “people of immigration background” and straight up calling people with immigrants grandparents who were born there immigrants to just broke me. I briefly opened Mastodon but saw the nutjobs and abruptly left. I tried using Lemmy in the past but ended up leaving because I essentially only need Reddit during commuting and Lemmy has a terrible mobile experience.
Agreed, I believe there should be more policy and legislation from the top down rather than being conscious of my own behaviours when it comes to privacy.
There should be harsher penalties for corporations or individuals found selling or leaking user data. There have been a number of high profile data breaches in Australia recently that I found went quiet far too quickly.
I don’t generally care if another human “coincidentally discovers” otherwise personal things about me. I think almost everyone has “information” they want kept private, like pin numbers or passwords.
In general I prefer to stay as private as possible because a) I don’t actually know what my data could be leveraged for, neither today nor decades down the road, and b) privacy is a one-way street - data is private and anonymous until it’s not, and then it never is, ever again.
For instance I don’t feel a third party should be able to access my health records without my explicit permission for the purposes of denying e.g. employment, insurance or some other service or benefit. My country has laws in place to protect my health records but that could change at any time. Also people don’t always follow laws, and the Internet is worldwide, not nationwide.
I also care about privacy as a consequence of liberty. I love that it’s your choice not to be private, and I feel very strongly it should be a choice. You should never be compelled to reveal information you want kept private unless it’s absolutely necessary to protect the rights of others. For instance a murder suspect, in a case where a sufficient legal standard has been reached, should be compelled to provide relevant evidence for the purposes of solving the case.
I do care about privacy, but I care about other things too, and I try to reach a compromise out of them. Sometimes the compromise means that I’m losing a tiny bit of privacy for the sake of a lot of something else, or that I don’t do something else for the sake of my privacy.
However, I feel like this should be a personal decision. Some people like the OP might put a higher value on those other things than on their privacy, and that is completely OK, as long as OP decided this for themself instead of someone else doing it. And for that people in general need laws and tools to protect the privacy of the people. It’s the same conclusion as @kadu reached, through other means.
