Refuge in Plurality: Coping in a post-privacy world
There are about 3 billion monthly active users on Facebook.
Three billion. That’s 3,000,000,000 people. On one platform.
That's a big number. And you might be one of them.
Given that you're one in literally billions, does your particular data matter all that much? Your casual messages, Marketplace offerings, strangely unhinged messages on closed groups?
Don't get me wrong, you should definitely be mindful of what data you share with Big Tech. Maybe don't share your deepest, darkest secrets with them (which is why I will never, ever share my genome(!!!) to services like 23andMe...).
However.
The everyday stuff, the non-important, the non-sensitive, the casual.
Does it matter so much to be a drop in the ocean? Is there any real harm in it?
You could opt out entirely and live like a digital hermit, but that has its own costs too.
In light of this, I figure a pragmatic, sober way to think about this is the following: I'm not that interesting. In the grand scheme of things (and in the eyes of Big Tech), I'm just a data point.
And maybe that's alright. Maybe it's worth the compromise of digital convenience.
Maybe.