I think it’s kind of sad that we need to ask the question of what got you into privacy, as opposed to what caused you to give up your privacy. I understand why we must the question, but it’s still sad to me. This is my answer, by the way. Because we need to ask “why privacy”, is the reason I want privacy.
I am also german. Of course not everyone here cares about privacy, but in average much more people than in other countries I would say. But the “average german” uses FB and WhatsApp. However, many like me never had them installed.
I think it’s because of our recent history full of spying secret services (Nazis and east germany) and the education in family and in school about the history. My family is from East germany. The stasi (east german secret service) observed everyone they could with hidden microphones in private rooms, reading your lettters, force your friends to spy on you etc. So the people that raised me are very aware of spying… From my grandparents and parents stories I cared about privacy from the beginning. My parents also used Linux since I remember them using computers and gave us phones with lineage etc… …
Of course we do, but for example we use nicknames on Facebook and our government shot down the real name verification they were pushing.
Data privacy acts are actually enforced, and most users are at least somewhat informed about GDPR and their rights.
Meta is not allowed to link facebook and whatsapp user data to get around that, so the data gathered within whatsapp is not nearly as powerful as the connection between the two would be (three, if you count Instagram), etc. etc.
I worked in a field that managed a lot of technology in retail stores. The big ones know everything about you, it’s just astonishing. At the time (around 15 years ago) there was very little oversight, but also most CIOs were inept and couldn’t really make the data sing and dance. Today that is very much no longer true, and it’s almost too easy to build a comprehensive profile of an “anonymous” guest and then attach it to their personally identifiable information, all without their consent or knowledge.
I forget exactly when it happened, but shortly after Facebook launched to the public. I had an account for a few years but was always uncomfortable with it. Then when Cambridge Analytica and Facebook were exposed I went scorched Earth.
Since then I’ve learned programming, networking, and some basic cryptography in an effort to better understand and protect myself. I’ve been a Linux user for about 25 years, so it wasn’t too hard for me to adapt.
Long story short. I googled my name and city and was sufficiently creeped out. Ive been online a long time and just didn’t notice how much privacy had eroded around me. It’s like that parable about how to cook a frog. They just slowly increased the temp on me. Fortunately I’ve jumped out of the pot before I got cooked alive.
I think a pretty significant part was moving, kind of by chance, to Linux and then watching videos of the content creators that revolve around it, but even before that I think I started questioning the matter more when I played (please don’t laugh) Watch Dogs 2, I know it’s silly, but it had some themes that were really compelling, the techno dystopia going on is pretty accurate in how bad it can be and playing as characters that go against it made me think a bit more about that, then after getting really into privacy I realized how spot on it was in several instances
Oh, glad it’s not only me!
I always wondered why so many seemed to dislike it, I thought it was good, though I never played the first one so maybe they didn’t like how it compared to it
i somehow stumbled across duckduckgo and ended up reading its write up on why we need to use google search alternatives. The big one that clicked with me was how google can (and likely does) manipulate search results based on race and other factors. it immediately clicked why so many people are so self confirmed in their own biases and how to protect free and rational discourse we need to protect privacy.
Prying parents, I won’t say they were overkill but they would look through my phone weekly and if I left it unlocked they would browse through my private messages and stuff. Now I have a separate password for everything have all of my important files in Knox on my phone a 1tb encrypted partition on Nixos and I plan to replace my phone eventually with a google pixel running graphine. I hated being spyied on and its sad that there’s people who live like this in general. The only plus is I convinced my friends to use signal and that’s how we call and chat now.
When I was younger I was amazed by how easy it was to track people on the early internet. this is when putting a script tag in a comment section to show images in comments was popular but quickly became exploited and faded away. I also became worried about this in my web development class learning how to use JS and saw how easy it was for a bad actor to execute malicious JS on people’s browsers.
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