> This argument, "People don't really care about <x> ...", is not so much an argument as it is a rationalization for amoral or simply bad behavior on the part of the seller/supplier.
It's worse than that. It's adversarial propaganda.
People actually do care about privacy, but they also care about other things, and they don't always know about privacy.
If Amazon tells you that they're recording what you say at all, it's buried in a hundred page ToS that nobody reads, and then what they do with the information isn't even clearly specified. If people understood that they're using it to determine which products to show you so you're more likely to buy the ones with higher margins, and that's costing you $1200/year, people would care about that, but they don't even realize it's happening.
If the market is consolidated into two companies and they're both invading your privacy, or there is one company that doesn't but their product costs $500 more and the customer doesn't have $500 more, it's not that customers don't care, it's that they have no viable alternatives.
If they start using a product before it starts invading their privacy and then later it does, but that product is something like Microsoft Windows and by then they're so thoroughly locked into that platform that short-term extrication is infeasible, they grit their teeth and whinge about it because they wish there was an alternative, not because they don't.
Casting this as "people don't care" gets it wrong. If there are two otherwise-identical fungible products and one of them invades your privacy and the other one doesn't, not doing that is an advertisable feature. In a competitive market it's a competitive advantage. But if the incumbents can convince would-be competitors that it isn't then they don't have to face that competition, which is the purpose of the propaganda.
And in the markets where competition is lacking independently of this, the "regulation" needed is antitrust, because uncompetitive markets have more than just privacy problems.
It's worse than that. It's adversarial propaganda.
People actually do care about privacy, but they also care about other things, and they don't always know about privacy.
If Amazon tells you that they're recording what you say at all, it's buried in a hundred page ToS that nobody reads, and then what they do with the information isn't even clearly specified. If people understood that they're using it to determine which products to show you so you're more likely to buy the ones with higher margins, and that's costing you $1200/year, people would care about that, but they don't even realize it's happening.
If the market is consolidated into two companies and they're both invading your privacy, or there is one company that doesn't but their product costs $500 more and the customer doesn't have $500 more, it's not that customers don't care, it's that they have no viable alternatives.
If they start using a product before it starts invading their privacy and then later it does, but that product is something like Microsoft Windows and by then they're so thoroughly locked into that platform that short-term extrication is infeasible, they grit their teeth and whinge about it because they wish there was an alternative, not because they don't.
Casting this as "people don't care" gets it wrong. If there are two otherwise-identical fungible products and one of them invades your privacy and the other one doesn't, not doing that is an advertisable feature. In a competitive market it's a competitive advantage. But if the incumbents can convince would-be competitors that it isn't then they don't have to face that competition, which is the purpose of the propaganda.
And in the markets where competition is lacking independently of this, the "regulation" needed is antitrust, because uncompetitive markets have more than just privacy problems.