We’ve been through this already. You’ve either read or passed articles on why we should care, always with the same flavor, always done in the same way.

But let me present a different take.

People generally are divided into three categories when the subject privacy comes up. Either you think we shouldn’t care and leave at that. You don’t understand the trade off people are talking about and think that if this would be important you’d see some kind of warning manifest in reality. After all, if nothing seems off, and nothing seems to be happening other than you getting through life seamlessly, there’s no catch.

The second group of people think it’s dangerous. If you have nothing to hide, you should open you doors and windows and calmly wait for the police to get it’s job done and save the lives of our community.

Third group of people is bar far the one who is most difficult to emphasize with. After all why do what we do, and keep off of Instagram, avoid Android and Amazon like the plague? Just how complicated can we make our lives become?

I cannot tell you why we all do it, because the reasons are diverse, and even sometimes, misplaced. But I can tell you why you should do it.

Privacy has become an umbrella term for us, whether we mean the creep feeling of someone we fell is spying on us or what a certain employee at a certain company (not even a Tech company by the way), may or may not know about you.

Neither of these are the reasons that I want you to care about privacy.

So what’s the deal?

The deal is that your behavior is the golden mine of both companies or governments. What you do, how you act and think defines both of their outcomes. If you don’t believe me than we’ve simply stepped in an authoritarian system, and damn it if it happened we aught to stop the comedy right now and declare that we are now under authoritarian rule. If not and the government hasn’t started posting public humiliations of citizens displaying any resistance to the status quo, assume we’re in democracy because having an ability to fight is better than the ability to shut up.

We are a made by the world as much as makers of it, even if what you measure measures at scale. And our actions have a determining influence in who gets to be powerful and who doesn’t. That’s all it is.

Now, for the first time in history, we have the knowledge to re-engineer both beliefs and behaviors, and it’s showing. Everywhere you see people launching campaigns to make themselves be beloved or others hated. Power now has a price tag, and competition cannot even survive if they deprive themselves of what has now become the making of our time.

This can now be said for everyone. If you think you can escape this sad fate, look back 10 years ago. What did you believe back then? What did your friends used to believe? What do you all believe now? It’s a fate no one has escaped. We became split. Everyone has radicalized their beliefs.

But this requires you both know a target and you can reach it. None of it has been planed before the advent of technology as we know it today. But this is the natural consequence of our blind journey through the power and prowess it offers and our own ignorance.