I notice several posts have been made regarding the current Slashdot con census regarding privacy. When some people say that they aren't worried about any privacy issues because they're too insignifant to care about as far as Google's concerned, some others pipe up and comment that in the "old days" of Slashdot, they'd be in the extreme minority, whereas nowadays it's fairly common to see this opinion.
Here's the problem - there IS no privacy on the Internet anymore. Compared to the old days of Slashdot, surveillance and logging has become so commonplace and pervasive, that even if you don't put your particulars on the Internet yourself, someone else might do it themselves. A good example would be a friend who uploads a picture on Facebook which has you tagged, even if you don't use Facebook. Heck, if you don't use it, you may not even know the picture exists until it's brought to your attention. At the very least, it's hard to remain isolated from the privacy issues of the Internet, short of becoming a hermit and avoiding any social contact.
So the reason privacy is being given up, as seen by some people, is because it's frigging tiring to have to check, double-check, workaround and in the end, give-up the fun and useful services and technologies available to us on the Internet, because very little of them respect total privacy. It's also hard to justify such extreme paranoia when it's highly unlikely you'll encounter any actual problems, so long as you use common sense.
In the end, we're all gonna die anyway, so freaking RELAX. Whatever privacy issues you were concerned about won't matter an iota regardless of whether you get buried, cremated or shot out of a canon into the sun.
PS. There's also the tiny fact that you WON'T CONVINCE EVERYONE about the importance of privacy anymore. That boat has sailed, given how much Facebook is used as a benchmark. So don't fret about worried how how you think privacy is becoming extinct. If you want to live in the modern digital age, it already has...
