I think we’re talking about an abstract concept here. The example with the sex questions is more of a metaphor/image to make you remember there is stuff out there, we’d like to keep private. It’s not necessarily your main concern regarding google. Those are different things but way less graphic and more difficult to explain, so i went with this example instead.
only matter if you are running for office or something
You’re close to the category of people i described last. You don’t care for freedom. You don’t care your attention is guided by other people. Information that is shown to you is gated by algorithms. And their power to manipulate you comes from the knowledge they have about you.
no-one cares about their specific data
Au contraire. Companies pay big money for data. The more specific, the more valuable. The biggest companies of today, like amazon, google, twitter, meta… Their business model is to collect data about you, sell advertisements, maybe even sell the data they’ve collected about you. And all of that is worth billions and billions of dollars. Why do you think they let you use TikTok or YouTube or something for free and the comany still makes millions? You’re right. That’s the cumulative sum. Your own data maybe is only worth 15$ to some company. Maybe more to some hacker if your credit card info gets leaked, too. But it doesn’t make it any better if you’re not the only one who gets exploited, but you’re part of an exploited majority… The TikTok algorithm, the ads etc are specifically tailored to your personality. To influence specifically your attention.
And what do you even tell the few people who actually suffer consequences? Like, i read stories about women being stalked with the help of social media. Sometimes even police officers using their computers to stalk ex partners. Their data gets collected in mass. And stored for legitimate reasons… Do you tell them: Bad luck you’re being stalked by some scummy person? We the 99.9% of people don’t have this specific problem?