privacy is a premium feature now. it shouldnt be.

NOTE: I refuse to call Facebook "Meta".

Before I start this "blog post" (more of a rant), let me be absolutely clear: I am not some off-the-grid survivalist, living in a cabin in the middle of nowhere who is writing a manifesto, and I don't want others to "return to nature" either. I use Discord, I use Youtube, I am, by every measurable metric, part of the very problem I am describing here. But... that's kind of the whole point, isn't it? The system that governs us is designed so that you cannot opt out without losing something fundamental.

If you want privacy in 2026, you need one (or, ideally all) of these things:

1. Money. Subscriptions to Mullvad, Proton, Tuta, a decent VPN, maybe even your own hardware. Privacy-respecting services aren't free because YOU aren't the product, which means someone has to actually pay for the servers.
2. Technical Knowledge. You need to know how to setup and use Linux (granted, this has gotten a lot easier over the years, but it is still a barrier) or a BSD distro if you really hate yourself. You need to understand what the hell a "firewall" is, what "browser fingerprinting" is, and a dozen other things that 99% of people will never care about.
3. Social Isolation. This is probably the biggest hurdle. Many people simply say "hey, just use [matrix] and Signal!", but the truth is: they don't work. Well, they do work but almost no average person will use something like matrix. Even Signal, which is simple to use, is not popular in most countries (e.g., India!!) because everyone is on Whatsapp already.

You need all of these three things to even begin to have privacy online, and even then, you are still leaking data in all sorts of way you probably don't know about or didn't even think was possible.

Like, companies are able to infer your mental state, your political opinions, and even your relationship status based on your shopping patterns. But hey, that's easy to do (relatively speaking). You know what's harder? Tracking you based on gait recognition. Or, tracking you before you even ever log in to create an account. And unfortunately, both of these things exist and are possible.

But the company said "we take your privacy seriously"!

Every single time a company says this, what they actually mean is: "we will make it slightly more annoying for you to find the opt out button, but we are still going to sell your behavioral profile to the highest bidder anyways, and there is nothing you can do :D!"

This isn't even cynicism, it's just observable reality. When was the last time you saw a company say "we take your privacy seriously" and then actually do something meaningful about it? They put it in a blog post after a data breach, they update their privacy policy to be 47 pages longer, and then they go right back to harvesting anything and everything you do.

The worst part is, everyone cares about privacy. Everyone. They just don't know how much they care until it's too late. People say "but, I have nothing to hide!" right up until the moment their search history, location data, or private messages get leaked, sold, or used against them. Then suddenly privacy matters a whole lot.

We have basically been gaslit into believing that constant, 24/7 surveillance is just "the cost of being online." but, it isn't. It was never supposed to be.

Uh huh.... cool, so how did we get here?

Well... it's complicated.

It's not like humanity collectively woke up one morning and decided "you know what sounds great? selling every intimate detail of our lives to massive corporations!". No one really agreed to this. What happened in reality was essentially a very slow and very quiet "take-over".

It happened every time a "free" email account was created. Just one more social media profile! Just one more "convenient" smart device for your "smart home"!! Just ONE more app that NEEDS access to your contacts, location, microphone, and your firstborn child's soul!!!

By the time people started to realize the extent of the tracking imposed onto us by our tech overlords, the infrastructure was already built, and we had already became dependent on them for:

• Work: Google Workspace, Slack, Microsoft 365, Zoom, etc.
• School: Zoom (again...), Microsoft Teams, Google Classroom, Canvas, etc.
• BASIC Human Communication: Whatsapp, Discord, Instagram, iMessage, etc.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is that the dependency came first and awareness later. And by the time awareness spread, opting out of these services meant opting out of society as a whole, and, at least in my personal opinion, it has intentionally been designed to be that way.

But isn't the EU fighting for privacy? The regulators will fix this!

It's trying, and unfortunately failing to some extent.

Let me be honest: I think most of the EU's privacy legislation is simply theater. I'm not claiming all of it is, but most of it definitely is. What the GDPR and its various cousins have actually accomplished is turning surveillance into "consensual" surveillance. Before their laws, companies harvested your data silently in the background, and now, the only difference is that they shove a massive cookie banner in your face, you click "accept all" because you're trying to read an article or, god forbid, talk to other humans, and suddenly they have your legal consent to basically spy on you.

There you go! Congratulations! You have been "protected"!

But the fines...

When the EU fines Google or Facebook hundreds of millions of euros, these companies treat it like a parking ticket. Sure it's not a sum that won't affect them, but in the grand scheme of things, it's basically a rounding error.

I am not pulling this sentiment out of my ass either, the largest fine the EU has dished was 4.34 billion euros in 2018 over Android. Anyways... in 2018 their profit was 30.7 billion USD. Next year, in 2019, their profit was 34.3 billion USD . Two years later (2020)... their profit was 40.3 BILLION USD, aka, roughly 35 BILLION EUROS. Best part? They didn't even change their practice! The reason they were fined didn't change, Google still controls search, ads, and Android distribution!

It's useless. They pay the fine, write a press release about how they're "committed to user privacy"¹, and then go right back to doing exactly what they were doing before, except now it's "legal" because you clicked a button.

But what about the right to be forgotten?

Well, it's cool but kind of useless... instead of banning the practice of selling user behavioral profiles to data brokers, the EU decided the solution was to let users ask companies to delete their data. sounds reasonable in theory, but in practice, it goes something like this:

1. Go to settings.
2. Click "privacy".
3. Toggle these 8 switches.
4. Click accept -> accept -> decline -> accept -> accept.
5. Press up up down down left right left right B A spacebar.
6. Repeat this process for every device you own.
7. Wait exactly 8 days, 9 hours, 34 minutes, and 38 seconds.
8. Do it all again to confirm.

And even after all of that... your data has already been sold. By the time you navigate that opt-out maze, your behavioral profile has been purchased by 50 different companies and redistributed through 50 different data brokers. What are you going to do, email each one individually? "Heyyyy, i know you bought this data from company A, but I told them i wanted privacy, so could you please delete the profile you paid money for? Pretty please????"

It's not really about protecting you. It was never about protecting you. It's about making sure the paperwork says you were protected, but that's about as far as the protection goes.

...yeah, i know.

I know how this sounds. Trust me, all I have to say is that I am not currently writting about how the industrial revolution was a disaster for humanity from a wooden shack in the forest. But I am close :p

And that is why privacy is a premium feature. Not because it's "technically difficult to implement" (it isn't), not because companies can't "afford to respect it" (they can), but because your data is worth more to them than your trust, and the entire system, from the apps to the laws to the social norms, have been engineered to make sure you keep handing it over.