Exactly this. Most people care about convenience above all else. People want their software to “just work” without having to fiddle with settings or add-ons or anything else.

but your average person owns an Alexa

The average person owns a smartphone. I cannot fathom how anyone thinks a device that sits in one place is a bigger threat than one with greater capabilities that you carry with you all the time.

I think about this every day, but I keep coming back to this: they do care. It’s just that they don’t always know they care, or to what extent. The big problem is that there’s virtually no way to visualize the harm in using privacy-invading products and services. Everything that goes on in the background of our phones, we’d never tolerate in real life.

If you could visually see every time there’s a background process, an app activating the mic, the sensors, the location, accessing your messages, etc., we’d be in a better position.

There’s no way we’d tolerate the IRL equivalents of what goes on digitally—at the browser level, at the app level, perhaps even at the OS level.

It’s usually visual cues that set off change. Think about it this way: 9/11 killed ~3000 people and we got the USA PATRIOT Act virtually overnight. COVID-19 happened and killed ~1.1 million people in the US alone. But because COVID wasn’t as “visual” and as “graphic” as 9/11, there was less urgency to do something about it.

I am one of those people. Nothing bad has ever happened to me in the decades I’ve been putting my info online beyond a bad actor getting ahold of my credit card info for a minute. I just don’t see the issue when companies with my data actively make my life better…?