Belief: Online privacy is highly valued by consumers.

Contrarian truth: Consumers readily sacrifice privacy for convenience.

I write about tech + humans + philosophy. Farcaster OG. FID 3305 founder of /theindex 

https://linktr.ee/joanwestenberg

Most costumers don’t care enough about online privacy to even call it a sacrifice.

Sadly, this is very accurate. 

I think privacy should be the default, and build with that in mind. ZK proofs is a great example I think.

For general consumer products, Signal and Session are 100x better than whatsapp, but I guess people use WhatsApp because of convenience?

Nothing made this clearer to me than the transparent feed on Venmo.

The costs are not there when making the choice, consumers (myself included) don’t know how the information tracking will affect us in 10-20 years. 

The data on us is literally stored for ever. 

If you knew asbestos caused cancer you wouldn’t have used it. Same with convenience, if you knew how privacy helps you.