Everyone cares about their privacy especially those who claim not to. What they really mean is they don't care for the privacy of others.

Privacy is simply the right to be left alone. To do your own business without intrusion from family, friends, the public or government or anything.

It's a position I can understand. How can anyone who doesn't do a deep dive like sniffing network traffic actually know that they're not being sold down the river, privacy-wise? They can't.

It's not even a terribly hard model - if a device has an Internet connection and is running proprietary software, it's only a matter of time until it spies on you or otherwise betrays your trust. But it sounds way too abstract and technical for the average person to act on it. And even in the case that there are off the shelf libre solutions, they still don't compete against all of the advertising pushing surveillance based solutions.

A good start would be actually having a choice. In several markets that are effectively essential products for a lot of people to live a normal life today - including transportation - that choice no longer exists in practice because the whole industry is on board with doing this stuff.

Every time these subjects come up someone says this should make us angry and we should push our political representatives to legislate or regulate in response to these threats. And then someone else reminds us that it's 2023 and most people have slightly higher priorities like being able to afford to keep their homes and feed their kids so even if issues like privacy matter to them a great deal they will rarely swing enough votes to carry any real weight politically. Unfortunately these problems demonstrate a failure of both our commercial and economic systems and our political and democratic ones.

[1] https://dmv.utah.gov/vehicles/rebuilt/specially-constructed

[2] https://tax.utah.gov/forms-pubs/pub-09

[3] https://highwaypatrol.utah.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/21/2...