Explaining why privacy is important is simple and difficult at the same time. It is like asking why freedom of speech is important. Or why everyone deserves a place to live. Very intuitive, but to give it the explanation it deserves, one could write a good book (which has been done in Dutch). Privacy is a fundament for living a truly free life. A life where you make your own decisions, without unsolicited control and censorship from outside parties. I have nothing to hide, but I have everything to protect. A couple of big companies don’t have the right to take my personal identity and use it for their company goals. I do not want my age, hobbies, living area, friends, or internet behaviour to be used to make money from selling ads and making addictive apps.
Companies have consistently been getting millions of euros of fines for not behind lawful in the way they collect our data. https://www.statista.com/chart/25691/highest-fines-for-gdpr-breaches/
Oh yeah, privacy is also Article 12 in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
To conclude this piece, I would like to end with a wonderful quote by Justin Rosenstein he made in the documentary /the Social Dilemma_ (2020).
“We live in a world in which a tree is worth more, financially, dead than alive, in a world in which a whale is worth more dead than alive. For so long as our economy works in that way and corporations go unregulated, they’re going to continue to destroy trees, to kill whales, to mine the earth, and to continue to pull oil out of the ground, even though we know it is destroying the planet and we know that it’s going to leave a worse world for future generations. This is short-term thinking based on this religion of profit at all costs, as if somehow, magically, each corporation acting in its selfish interest is going to produce the best result. This has been affecting the environment for a long time. What’s frightening, and what hopefully is the last straw that will make us wake up as a civilization to how flawed this theory has been in the first place, is to see that now we’re the tree, we’re the whale. Our attention can be mined. We are more profitable to a corporation if we’re spending time staring at a screen, staring at an ad, than if we’re spending that time living our life in a rich way. And so, we’re seeing the results of that. We’re seeing corporations using powerful artificial intelligence to outsmart us and figure out how to pull our attention toward the things they want us to look at, rather than the things that are most consistent with our goals and our values and our lives.”
Thanks @Laurens for providing all your knowledge