I'm sorry, but that's private.

Law enforcement used Facebook private messages to investigate and prosecute a woman for an "illegal abortion". This is not a hypothetical, this happened.

I care about my privacy because I don't want right-wing weirdos and perverts incarcerating me for controlling my own body.

There are more reasons. This is just the one most recently in the news as a glaring red flag real-life example.

• Feeling clean
• Not being exploited
• Minimalism
• Less power drain
• Less data sent
• Freedom
• Everything works better and faster
• I hate spying because they can
• To be honest also because most people don't care

The only con is convenience.

It’s kinda like this. Say you lead the most boring, law abiding, square life, top 20% of the bell curve in that zone.

Would you want strangers in your house, even if they couldn’t technically touch or take anything? Would you want them in your spouse’s closet? Your kid’s room? Looking in your fridge?

Creepy and “hell no”, right?

That’s what privacy is about. The right to lock your door against strangers snooping.

If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.

From Cardinal Richelieu

Combine this with the fact that entities which have access to our data rarely have our best interest in heart. Governments change, the political climate changes, and people change. What’s honest and just today may not be next decade.

Why do so many external entities care so much about constantly trying to reduce my privacy?

If they would not have started it, I wouldn't have started to care.

The right extremists are on the rise in my country. I would rather not have them knocking on my door in a few years to detain me for calling their leader a cunt on the internet.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

Although it is physically impossible for the single guard to observe all the inmates' cells at once, the fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched motivates them to act as though they are all being watched at all times.

that's not a world i want to live in...

Similar to you, but I also hate the advertising industry with a burning passion and want to deprive them of any and all data possible.

Privacy should be a basic human right.
Data collection could be massively abused by oppressive governments.

Not caring about it = Not caring about your rights.

Let's flip this question. Why do you think an organisation should get my data?

Are they reputable? Are they secure? Are they domiciled in my country and follow the laws of my country?

Same reason I shit with the door closed; I've got nothing to hide, but it's none of your business regardless.

There's no file system in existence that can handle a text file large enough to include all reasons why people care about privacy.

• having a stalker, makes privacy very important

• Having identity theft, makes privacy even more important

• Being pigeonholed, makes privacy important

It's a pillar of democracy to protect the autonomy of the people.

The same reason I care about a working democracy. You can't have one without the other.

To me it's much more of an ethical concern than a practical concern. Digital privacy is a human right (privacy is listed under Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights). The only immediate ways in which I can uphold this right and contribute to a fairer society is through exercising my right to vote and making ethically superior choices as a consumer. So for me, it's less about avoiding the government or big tech for practical reasons like surveillance and scams driven by data breaches (though of course these are still valid concerns for many) and more about supporting those who I believe are doing the right thing (or are at least an improvement).

If we don't support the better alternatives then they will never grow enough to achieve mainstream success and challenge the current establishment. I know some people here hate Proton, but that is a great example of a privacy-focused tech company which has grown significantly because of consumer support - to the point where it has a full suite of products that do a much better job of competing with heavyweights like Google than a tiny, unsupported startup would have had. A company like that might not even have survived without its early adopters, and then the next one to come along would be even less likely to receive investment in the early stages due to the history of failure within the sector. To me, being privacy conscious is all about being part of a positive movement; supporting people and companies that are doing the right thing and refusing to accept problematic behaviours and practices I see in the world.

I know for some people, particularly minorities, privacy is a real world concern and I fully acknowledge that but I think sometimes we do ourselves a disservice by trying to sell it to everyone in such a scary way. Humans are not very good at perceiving or responding to threat until there is actual undisputable evidence of it in their immediate surroundings. So when you tell these people that they'll lose all their money to scammers or that their government is going to unjustly target them they don't actually believe you or take you seriously. They think you are insane. The better sell, I think, is to show people that this is a positive movement and worldwide community that they can be a part of.

EDIT: I was going to add this yesterday but forgot. I don't know if anyone here has seen The Social Dilemma - the big reason that documentary went viral was not just because it gave a very detailed and scary overview of all the problems with surveillance capitalism and the attention economy, but also because it finished on quite an optimistic note. They told viewers "we know this is all really scary for you but we have smart people working tirelessly to change things and build a movement that we want you to be a part of". It left people feeling engaged, like they still had some level of agency over the situation instead of paralysed with fear and just totally abandoning all hope.

If you have ever had a psycho (or two) stalk you online and/or in the real world, you will understand why privacy and anonymity is important.

To be honest. What made me care about privacy was social media apps such as Reddit. Every single day, i used to get reddit notifications promoting "the most popular post in my country". Look, at first i didn't care. Now it got annoying, to the point where i replaced Refdit with Lemmy, getting rid of windows, switching to FOSS (free and open source software) apps and also using Degoogled Chromium. While reddit wasnt the only thing i mentioned so far, i hate how Youtube has to know where you live, and giving you directions to the nearest store (for certain ads). This probably may get malliciously used in the future, that's what i got really aware of. Now it really hurt me when Youtube has killed most 3rd party frontends (such as invidious and piped). So in conclusion, Privacy can really matter for me as a lot of services i used to use can now collect data about you.

I work in the public health sector.

And I am trans. Need more reasons?

Because in real life I don't like people looking over my shoulder at everything I do and digital snooping is the same (or worse).

Privacy is a foundational right. Without it inviduals suffer from the imbalanced power dynamic of the states resources.

i don't want anyone i work with to be able to find out what kind of porn i'm into

Because without privacy you can't be a proper human being. You need privacy in order to have the safe space to develop, to dare try, to explore without the constant judgement of others. If you can't be a proper human being, can you genuinely have democracy?

It's both a per-requisite for humanity and what the political system that is often considered as the most just.

That's why I care.

Similar to your experience, I've seen several large governments and organizations mishandle or mismanage user data by accident or on purpose many times with little or no recompense. If nobody can do it right they should either make it all publicly transparent for everyone or not store it at all.

Misinformation, not using accounts or accounts with incorrect information, multiple accounts, etc counter ops seem prudent at this point as the information system and monitoring apparatus of some of the most powerful governments and corporations in human history remains largely unchecked.

Privacy is an important right to protect and value because of the damage that can and will be done when groups hold personal information (financial, medical, behavior patterns, etc) and either sell it without explicit consent or leak it because they have no expectation of risk or loss if they don't protect it.

Tl;Dr The oldest rules of the Internet are don't believe everything you read and don't dox yourself.

Do you people sniff into your stuffs? No. So why do you allow companies to make profit on?

And we need the anonymous part too.

Privacy means hiding our legitimate stuffs to others than could spy on. In this way, privacy is a big family that needs anonymity and security to work well

EDIT : Anonymity and security are not different than privacy, they are a way to achieve it

It all kinda boils down to the Cambridge Analytica scandal for me. Harvesting people's locations and data, accessing and logging our daily lives is what facilitates mass manipulation of the public's opinion, therefore distorting their view of the world and killing freedom of thought. GAFAM and others are specialists in controlling their users. I ultimately don't want to be profiled, controlled and/or rail-roaded in any aspect of my life.

Traditionally, people like myself get killed due to bad opsec.

If you have time for an answer in audio form the CBC has some ideas.

It's curious that you claim privacy and anonymity are clearly differentiable but didn't bother to define either of them. Is your claim accurate? We have no idea, because we don't know what you're talking about.

George Orwell, Philip K. Dick, and Corey Doctorow already covered the basics, and two of those authors did so decades ago. Why are you asking this question now? What is it that you want to hear that they didn't already say? Or are you asking us whether we've read those authors?