I’m following several privacy focused communities. Mostly as lurker but in few I’m more active. Every time I see a posts like “how to be more private”, I wonder about the reasons behind those questions. What’s the reason you want to remain private (don’t confuse it with being anonymous)? Could you elaborate on your reasons?
Let me start.
I worked (and still working) in a highly regulated industry as a software/devops engineer. I’ve been working with banks, insurance companies, global online payment companies, major credit card vendors, few global corporations. I have seen how data is gathered and (mis)used. Every time someone tells me “I’m sorry but the system…” I know it’s the data gathered by the “system” and my profile created based on that data was the reason for “but”. This is why I care about the privacy, to prevent companies from taking advantage of my current situation and charge me more.
Imagine living in China,
where the government is able to request data of each company in their country.
Imagine that China would setup an AI/LLM, to feed all private chat data into it,
and automatically flagging opposition of the government regime.
Imagine a white van appearing in front of your house and disappearing into a concentration camp because you got flagged after expressing your opposition to the government to your mate in a private chat.
All collected data can be abused like that,
or by other means (E.g. a country at war gets hacked, which could lead to leaking critical private information on political/defensive decisions).
To me the question is not if data collected on you will be abused, but rather when will it be abused?
Just having it stored somewhere imposes risks.