What's happening here is that a state actor is forcing providers to let the state spy on me.
That's an authoritarian policy which I strongly oppose.
What about a discount on your purchases, which was funded by the government, who would then buy the data?
I would definitely trade my privacy with the government for any tax discount (and I think I'll have the longer stick, I'm no Indiana Jones) but whether I have an alternative or not is important.
A better question would be: would I move to a country where encryption is illegal if it had 0% tax? No, I would shop for another country. For a similar reason, I don't live in Dubai (0% tax but policies I don't approve of).
Because not everyone is a Programmer. Most people I know have never even heard about Snowden.
I have my own contradictions. I think the disappearance of payments in cash is a problem, it is not good to give the state too much control on a society. But I hardly use any cash myself.
Convenience is unfortunately a big factor.
It's also kind of harder to abuse information on my shopping list, whereas there's plenty of ways to abuse having total and complete access to all communication between private parties.
I don't quite see why our packets and devices shouldn't have the same protections.
That's different from arguing that they are mutually exclusive which I am not.
For example, I used to be on the extreme "pro privacy" end of the spectrum. But it is clear that philosophically speaking, privacy for everyone is not a completely positive ideal in all contexts. And that naturally raises the question about what other values privacy competes with, and how they should be balanced.
Intuitively, "convenience" should perhaps be considered less important than "privacy", but interestingly that's not what we observe actually happening in the real world.
To me, this isn't so surprising and is fully consistent with a greater willingness to give personal info to e.g. Amazon than e.g. the government.
Except once their data is out, they have no control over where it will end up. Profiling data is regularly sold to third parties.
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Company: Excuse me, would you mind us profiling you through an accurate survey of most of your everyday purchases?
Customer: Heck no!
Company: What if we let you collect "points" that will maybe someday safe you a little bit of money on one of these purchases?
Customer: Sign me up!
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Company: Excuse me, would you mind us recording everywhere you go all day every day and store that information for at least six months?
Customer: Heck no!
Company: What if you get a pocket computer with fast mobile internet connection in return, the corner stone of modern life?
Customer: Sign me up!