Maybe we should feel aggravated
Over the last few months I've developed a healthy obsession with digital privacy. As a long-time social media conscientious objector, privacy had only ever been a side effect rather than an intention, I stopped using social media because of its addictiveness rather than for the anonymity or as a form of rebellion against the system. This decision inadvertently led to an onslaught of Socratic questioning from friends which in turn forced me to start coming up with better arguments than "I waste too much time on it".
cue slippery research slope into dopamine, addiction, the engineering of the infinite scroll- wait why would these companies want us to be addicted to their products if they're free? What do they get out of it?
"If you're not the customer, you're the product"
It took me too long to come to the realisation that something they get out of it is information. I knew they collected data well before my lightbulb moment, of course. We're shown targeted ads and the algorithm tailors our feeds in response to likes, follows and engagement, data that we knowingly give them in exchange for a better user experience, so far so good. This, however, is barely half of the picture. Data is their business, and they get everything they can gather, from your IP address to third-party websites you visited to your spending patterns and whatever they can't get themselves, they buy from infamous data brokerage companies. Result: a highly detailed profile of each of us, even non-users, exists somewhere in a server right now. If that isn't the definition of unsettling then I don't know what is.
Most people don't realise just how little privacy we really have and how intentionally engineered that reality is; it's hard to when something happens so passively and is built into everything we use. Beyond social media platforms, virtually every website you visit, every service you sign up for and most browsers and search engines are also guilty. Even when people know, many just accept this as the price to pay for a connected and convenient life.
My point here isn't to propose a solution or lecture on how moral subservience is the wrong position to take about this, but, I don't know, maybe we should feel aggravated.