I wish the past twenty years hadn't been a futile effort of me and many others trying to convince people that they should care about privacy and their personal data even if they were 'nobody' or 'not doing anything wrong' or 'anonymously collected' or even if they thought 'there is nothing we can do about it', all the while coming across as paranoid or up to no good. Meanwhile I was right but fat good that does because the time to have done something impactful would have been 20 or so years ago and with a critical mass effort.
There has to be a term for humanity's tendency towards shrugging things off as unimportant until it becomes too late to do anything about it, and then getting really pissed off that nobody warned them enough.
It's difficult to argue against "free". The originally open spirit of the internet has been corrupted by companies who offer their services for "free", while in actuality it's done in exchange for the gold mine that is user data. Even if this is clarified, it's buried in the fine legalese of the T&S. And even if people read it, most will choose to make this exchange because they're already used to things being "free" online, because of the value of the service, and because it's never clarified how much their data is actually worth. The reality is that user data is exchanged in perpetuity on the data broker market, and the value extracted from it far exceeds the value of the service itself. Even paid services will harvest user data just because the profits from selling it exceed what they can realistically charge customers. All companies using this model should be paying users to use their service instead.
This is an insidious and downright evil business model, fueled primarily by advertising.
The term "Cassandra Syndrome" or "Cassandra Complex" is used to describe situations where individuals or groups make valid warnings or predictions about future disasters or problems, but are ignored or not taken seriously until it's too late.
There has to be a term for humanity's tendency towards shrugging things off as unimportant until it becomes too late to do anything about it, and then getting really pissed off that nobody warned them enough.