I think people don’t realize just how dangerous this shit is until they have been affected in some noticeable way, and even then they will not link just how the incredible amount of surveillance they are under every day is the cause of it.

I worked in tech support for 7 years, and one thing that will never cease to astonish me is how tech illiterate people are. Do you have any idea how many people called me and demanded that I make modifications to their account and refused to tell me any verifying information? While some might have been malicious actors , most aren’t. Most of them were genuinely expecting me to do everything for them and they wouldn’t even tell me what their name is. They fully expected that somehow we would already know they are just from them calling…

Some of them called me on a number not recognized by the system but they fully expected me to pull up their account (fucking how?) Without any information at all.

When you have worked in this field long enough you will know why there is so little effective opposition to all this shit. It is not just because they dont give a damn if we are literally in a 1984 scenario with active cameras and microphones in people’s homes, but they just dont understand what that really means. Even younger people who grew up with these devices from early childhood don’t fully understand just how much they are being observed. If anything Gen Z and Gen Alpha are more fucked since they are the first generation of people whom the algorithms and data brokers have had some profile on since early childhood.

As an elder millennial who grew up in a techie family with computers from childhood. I am fortunate in that they have nothing on me from early childhood to teen years. By the time I hit 20 the internet was still too chaotic and underdeveloped and algorithms weren’t the norm yet (and I was never a Google guy to begin with). But people born within the last 10 years can’t have that privilege.