And you’ve written some painfully edited highly professional email to your professor or boss and the response you get back from them is a single sentence, not even a signature.

So glad they made it such a point to teach us to write professional emails in my freshman year of college.

More like 80s babies, since we were actually old enough to remember those first two things

It’s hard to believe anyone missed this:

As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.

This article is from 2012

I wouldn’t underestimate it. I also wouldn’t buy into the “I have nothing to hide” narrative. It’s not about hiding or not hiding. The fallout from the Dobbs decision is a great example of why, if you aren’t concerned with privacy now, then you will be in the future. All of a sudden, the right of 51% of the population to make decisions about their own bodies was suddenly gone, and handed over to state governments. The day before that decision, people needing abortions and the doctors who provide them had “nothing to hide.” The day after? They’re suddenly criminals. Their social media can be monitored. Their online and in-person purchases. Where they travel and why. Their medical records. And maybe worst of all, their fellow Americans are offered prize money if they turn someone in so that they can be charged in criminal court.

Or what about Florida’s “risk prediction” software that supposedly can predict which “at-risk” (aka non-white) kids will become criminals? Maybe I’m wrong for finding that unsettling. This is from 2015

https://theweek.com/articles/495147/floridas-minority-report-crime-prediction-software

What about social credit scores? Which we already have, we just don’t get to see them (LexisNexis “risk solution” software). But sooner rather than later, every word and action will be recorded and held against us in every aspect of our lives, rather than just when applying for jobs and mortgages. And anti-discrimination laws don’t do shit. They always find a work around. Although with the current supreme court I’m sure all forms of discrimination will be perfectly legal soon enough.

Btw private browsing doesn’t prevent tracking. It just doesn’t store anything in the broswer history.

This does not come across the way you think it does.

I think their question is more about how we would implement that. Marx believed that proletariat uprising would be the “how,” and that it is an inevitability of end stage capitalism. But the nature of capitalism keeps people from attempting that. This is a system that we are forced to participate in if we want to survive. We need food and shelter and we don’t want to get arrested and/or murdered by cops for revolting. With that in mind, we have to get to a point where we collectively have nothing left to lose.