IMO, people largely DO care. If you ask the average Joe - is online privacy important to you, the majority would obviously say yes. Why then don't they stop using FaceCrook?

1. The penalty of social ostracism due to the network effect. This is a severe punishment to most humans - particularly in today's socially disconnected world. Without these apps, a large # of people would not have any contact with much of their social circle - including family.

2. Learned helplessness. I think that many people have just given up. Even if they knew how to fight for their privacy, they see time and time again that money always wins.

A better way of saying it would be that they just don't care that much. Most people care in theory about taking care of the environment, but that doesn't mean that they're willing to tolerate even 1c/gal higher fuel taxes. Most people care in theory about taking care of the poor but balk at the personal economic consequences of doing so. People have different priorities and when one consistently loses out to the others that means that they largely DON'T care about it.

> Tech folks drastically overestimate how much the average person cares about privacy.

This is old thinking. In the 90s and 00s it was miraculous to trade in a little privacy for some awesome free service on the internet. Google, Facebook and others became huge, and everyone has been influenced / manipulated by them and people are getting tired of having a family dinner conversation next to their smart speaker and seeing ads for six weeks for Depends diapers because someone told a bad joke at the dinner table.

I’d argue that “privacy” is just a significant trigger argument for most people, but not felt as important per se outside of the context of being afraid of the social consequences of some behaviors being exposed.

Take all the paranoia and “muh privacy” around contact tracing or the European Green Pass: It’s as anonymous as it can be, yet millions of people argue against them across the political chasms that separate them. So yes: unless it becomes a divisive topic (which would be undesirable), this CSAM scanning will go away with the news cycle.

About your comment on celebrities’ “sex-tapes”. I guess it takes a certain kind of extroversion and (positive) narcissism to be one, and they’re expected to be gossiped about or to show their bodies in movies or photos so I don’t think those victims blinked that much - some like P. Hilton probably manufactured some porn to ride the wave. On the other hand, revenge porn did drive ordinary people to suicide because in this case the victims weren’t prepared or expected to let the public to see that.

If privacy was a selling point to buy Apple, then it will be a selling point to buy a competitor.

Who knows how much it will matter in the end? But it is hard to argue it doesn't matter.