I know data privacy is important and I know that big corporations like Meta became powerful enough to even manipulate elections using our data.
But, when I talk to people in general, most seem to not worry because they “have nothing to hide”, and most are only worried about their passwords, banking apps and not much else.
So, why should people worry about data privacy even if they have “nothing to hide”?
You may have nothing to hide, but have you seen what ChatGPT or Midjourney can do? How easily it can AI turn text into an image, or text into reply? Do you realize that the data you are not hiding is used to teach an AI how to manipulate you? It knows who you are, what you like, and most importantly - it is slowly learning (on all of the people who “have nothing to hide”) exactly what to show to you on FB/YT, to eventually manipulate you into doing whatever they asked it to do.
Do you spend a lot of time on YT/FB/IG? Are you happy with doing that, or do you think you should be spending more time doing something else? The more data they have from anyone, including you, the better will the AI be at simply keeping you glued to the screen no matter what. And it’s only a matter of time before someone uses it to change how you vote, or what you think. And you will not notice that, because it has so much data about you, and so much data about everyone, that it’s as good at manipulating you without you noticing based on the data it has about you, as Midjourney is in generating pictures based on the text you give to it. And the only way how they could teach Midjourney to do that, was by giving it a lot of data about pictures.