Yeah. This is exactly the problem. There is too much of a disconnect from the action to the impact in this case. I think if most people saw precisely what data is collected on them and how it is used (and how often it is part of data breaches from these identity resolution platforms and third parties), I think they'd care more.

But nearly everyone has more urgent and pressing concerns like making monthly rent or a medical bill or gas money. So ACR on a TV doesn't register.

I really don't think most people would care more when you show them examples of others. Some people would, but most would not. We see this all the time with legislation around rights in the US. Much of the voting population lack the capacity for deep critical thought and don't care to practice empathy from even a devil's advocate perspective. Stuff like tracking speech/identity online, abortion debate, gun debate, etc. Nobody cares unless they are directly affected.

Take guns for example. If you use guns, then you see a value to them and generally oppose mire restrictions. If you have been shot or robbed with a gun (or know people who have), then you dont see the value of guns and want more restrictions. If you are neither of these things then its easy to not care and say sure to more restrictions because they don't impact you and aound like they might provide some benefit, especially if just looking at the surfqce level stats. Same concept for abortion and online tracking/identity, especially once you mix in the think-of-the-children arguments in each of these.

> if most people saw precisely what data is collected on them and how it is used (and how often it is part of data breaches from these identity resolution platforms and third parties), I think they'd care more.

What are the chances of an individual being negatively affected in a serious way?

Intuitively, I expect it to be so negligible that it isn't worth losing sleep over.

I would say the chances of a negative impact is on par with the chances of negative impacts on most of the hottest debate topics such as guns and abortion. Identity theft, swatting/doxxing, and stalking can have serious impacts and are not that uncommon. They're just uncommon enough that most people don't care until it happens to them.

This is one of those things that is hard to quantify. Although I'm sure some has. It negatively impacts society overall very slowly over time. It has the effect of eroding private life in subtle way that it's barely noticeable until we find ourselves in a surveillance state where corruption is everywhere. Let me know if that sounds familiar to you.

Still low, but people do register creepiness when they directly see the creepiness, even if nothing resulted from it yet.

> What are the chances of an individual being negatively affected in a serious way?

Perhaps if said individual is a politician and a television is compromised to record what happens in their home (or even bedroom).

Or perhaps compromise televisions in hotel rooms (politician or not).

It's more profitable for LG to sell your data to advertisers than to build and sell the TV itself

The negative effect is the exact sky high prices that Americans keep complaining about. The point of all that advertising data is to nudge you towards accepting higher prices or buying things you otherwise wouldn't.

Every dollar of revenue in the advertising industry is money taken from consumers and spent on unproductive waste to get you to spend more money instead of anything like making a product better or investing in capacity or researching and developing new products.

Google makes money by making you spend more money. Facebook makes money by making you spend more money.

And something negative hardly ever happens to them, or anyone, from that direct source, so why spend a brain cell on it.

Or because it's so secretive the people don't even know the source was from their device spying on them. "Oh, some hacker on the darknet stole my data" is the track that many non-tech people would see this.

The worst thing for privacy advocates is that there has yet to be a general public reckoning with the ad-economy of the last 20 years.

For all intents and purposes, the average person who has paid no mind to their privacy over that time period is really no better or worse off than the person who has devoted hours to combating all forms of invasion.

If there was a mass scale visible event of privacy loss, i.e. Meta somehow ends up in a shamelessly evil sociopaths hands who decides to start very publicly embarrassing random people with privately collected data, there would be very swift and immediate action.

Just look at datacenters. The public didn't even know what a DC was 6 months ago, and now politicians are getting elected to ban them. What happened? AI gave the mass public common sensation of fear.

> Meta somehow ends up in a shamelessly evil sociopaths hands

It's not clear that it isn't already, but you know, lawful evil rather than chaotic evil.

You see that, Timmy? Every time someone complains about something, somenone says that it happens because no one cares. What’s the logical conclusion, then? To not care yourself. Because it would be too difficult to change anything if you’re completely alone. And so you have thousands of people each in their own bubble, each thinking that they are alone in caring about, well, anything, and that therefore nothing can be done.