While that may be true, I don’t think understanding that companies are evil is enough to convince anyone to care about privacy. I’ve known corporations are evil for well over a decade but I only started caring about privacy at all a few weeks ago. the issue is that privacy feels so unnatainable to average people that it may as well be a myth. how can you even think about if your internet history is private when you don’t even know how to access internet history yourself? even if you do, it’s not like these companies gossip to your friends about your mundane secrets anyway, it’s just some faceless entity filing it away somewhere to probably be forgotten. that’s the perception I had at least, and I know I wasn’t the only one. what really changed my mind about privacy was being immersed in a community of people that cared about privacy and took time to show that it can be achievable and even convenient both to understand the forces and technologies at play and to actually live a more privacy focused life.

Ask them if they’d go nude in public, to prove that they have nothing hidden under their clothes, or if they’d let their parents/the authorities see their porn collection, to make sure it’s all legal and above board. Then pivot the conversation to the dignity of not being surveilled constant just in case you might be doing something wrong, with zero suspicion.