Privacy is important to me, but I don't kid myself that I can achieve it to the extent that I would like, because in addition to cameras that are everywhere, we are spied on by our smartphones, computers, smart TVs and every device that is connected to the internet.
Not only that our phones spy on us, we give or leave behind a lot of digital or online footprints; IP address, location, device etc. To all the sites we visit a footprint is left behind and our ISP keep a track on the URLs we click. All these info are/could be compromised by advertisers, identity hackers or the Government, for personalized uses, like Ads for companies and scam for hackers.
The online footprints can't be removed completely for people who tend to minimize, control or secure the kind of information they've shared online or about to give out. Risking the identity of many users and boosts sales for big tech companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon etc that depends on personalized ads to make billions of dollars.
Amazon in 2021 made $26billion in sales using personalized ads; tracking the activities of users, the products they like shopping and other shops also take advantage of users data to scale their profits.
Google read our mails to also personalize ads, aside the numerous information they get from searches and chrome browser
Facebook left hundreds of millions of user's passwords on a plaintext, not hashed. Increasing the possibility of untrustworthy insiders to access users passwords.
These are vulnerabilities we expect from top giant sites personalizing billions of users data to increase profit.
Therefore, I would conclude that privacy is a matter of personal choice, and this means that those who want more privacy must be ready to make some concessions in life if they want to succeed in this.
This is excellent, but for every user who spend time online there is a privacy breach on their personal information, which they wouldn't approve of if left to decide. Many users on social media share too many details about themselves via posts, and comments or even likes, these we can't avoid while on social platforms.
To stay on a minimal percentage of breached data, one must minimize what they share online also cut off Google (its possible) Duckduckgo for search purposes, VPN to minimize how ISPs get our information, use email aliases for subscriptions and lastly and crucial halt the use of Facebook or google sign ins to create accounts of third party sites that demands us to do so. It puts all our information at risk and when attacked the hacker can have access to other linked accounts too. That means we must make our own settings online, using default settings only guarantees that these platform would have access to more and more detailed information about us; the users.