Never.

Just look at what happens on Reddit when Mastodon is brought up in the Threads/Twitter wars.

“Ohhhh it’s too haaaaard to use. What does it matter about a little privacy loss anyway?”

We (i.e. those of us who work in the industry and care about such things) really need to work on messaging to get through to normal people.

For instance, people are genuinely freaked out at the idea of Facebook listening to them through their phones. It really hits a nerve. Now that isn’t happening, but what is happening is even worse. Facebook are able to predict your behaviour, your thoughts, so well that it gives the illusion that they’re listening to you. They’ve spent decades training their models on your behaviour, your content, both on their website and across the entire web and beyond. And they’ve fucking nailed it.

That’s far far more scary than them listening to you. They know things about you that you don’t even say out loud. It’s terrifying.

I’m an average Joe and try to minimize my digital footprint as much as convenience allows, but keep seeing people say that this is paranoia and doesn’t matter.

This the dystopia we chose for ourselves.

Women I knew started to care when I showed them articles about how google and meta knew their menstrual cycles, and reported on searches about abortions to law emfprcemt