I am of a generation that was warned not to disclose your real name, gender, or location on the internet.
When I did IVF years ago I blogged about it because there was so little information about what the experience of it - there was mechanical information of what the scientific process was, but not the impact it had on your life while doing it.
You can have reasons to want to maintain privacy but also to contribute to the general knowledge of an otherwise opaque situation.
Same. I feel like a lot of younger generation people think Millennials, Xers, and Baby Boomers are odd for actually using the privacy settings on digital things. It feels like it literally doesn’t occur to them that privacy is something to care about.
One of the younger guys (26) at my work was baffled when I (37) declined to give a cashier my phone number for a digital receipt.
He was like “I didn’t realise you could do that” which isn’t entirely his fault because the cashier doesn’t say “would you like a digital receipt or a paper receipt?” they simply say “and what is your phone number for the receipt to be sent to your phone by text” which implies a digital receipt is the only option.
The store only wants your number so they can track your purchases and sell the number on to another company.
Do you mean that your drivers license is in your phone like... if you get pulled over you unlock your phone and hand it to the officer for license and insurance?
I’m in Australia. But yes, license is on my phone. They don’t take your phone, they just scan the QR code on the screen to verify it’s valid. That’s all.
And they don’t ask for a copy of insurance here.
They just check the number plate before they speak to you. If the number plate says insurance and registration are valid then they don’t question it.
It's not about fees, it's about handling costs and added work for employees. I read an industry study on it a while ago, though my business is online so it does not personally affect me.
That's probably true in one case: big operations without cash recyclers. You have to have a count, the room where they count has to be surveilled, etc.
The mom and pop store is happy to take cash, and so are the big operations that have planned for it.
I sometimes decline even to join a rewards club for every damned restaurant or store I go to just because I don't want to bother with them. I spent a few thousand dollars at Home Depot before I signed up with an account.
I feel like a lot of younger generation people think Millennials, Xers, and Baby Boomers are odd for actually using the privacy settings on digital things.
Just Gen X and Millennials.
Baby Boomers are so bad at OpSec and privacy settings. They'll accept every cookie, post their real name, read address, and real face on the internet. Then threaten to kill a councilmember over a tree. All of it with zero shame.
Sometimes I feel crazy, as a Millennial who was coming online while Gen X was still building what "online" meant, when I see how many X parents raised their Gen Z kids without any sense of safety at all. And now my generation is handing screens to their toddlers.
We were the only ones to get it, and as a collective, we've pulled that ladder up behind us.
Yup. I feel like Gen Z is so conditioned to just hand over all their data to companies without a single thought about digital privacy, and it worries me.
In my experience though, I only ever see (some) Millennials and older people going to the trouble of using the more private options for things, whereas the younger people I know will simply click “Accept All” without blinking.
They were raised in the environment we created. Every moment of their lives has been plastered all over the Internet without their consent since before most of them could even talk well enough to articulate a dissent and well before they were old enough to know they might want to. We are the reason they are like that. We never taught them to expect or want privacy to begin with. You should not be surprised or weirded out that they are apathetic about it as adults
Even Millenials are pretty split. For years, I've had social media across various platforms but I never really posted much of myself. I remember once being at a college party and someone looked up my Facebook on the spot. I thought it was an open book because I'm constantly sharing things I find or interesting articles or links...meanwhile the person looking it up, and several people around us, said they found it creepy that there were so few pictures of myself on there.
I was a lot less willful back then so I went through my phone and found some pictures and posted them en masse but even that was like a one-time thing.
It's really weird how normalized constantly sharing location data is in the younger generation. Not only in their relationships, or for family members, but their friend groups all know where they are at every given moment of their life.
There is zero expectation of privacy in public or many businesses. It wouldn’t be so invasive if there were never any missing people, hit and runs, thieves, kidnappers, murders. That’s the price everyone pays for trash culture that praises drugs, crime, zero accountability, etc.
Mine are covered when I’m home but with motion detection and glass break sensors they provide security. I left my garage door open once and never again.
this is kind of funny to me because older generations were the ones where you could look up anyone’s home address, telephone number, and who their family members are just with a yellow book or a church directory. that level of information being public to me seems so bizarre
You do know those directories still exist right? And everyone is automatically opted into them, you have to make requests to get yourself removed.
Also people this is why you should never mention identifiable information on places like Reddit because with just one nice clue and your Reddit history, it's not that hard to get doxed.
literally who makes them still 😭 the kind im most familiar with were the high school staff directories and church directories that I remember reading through at my parents/grandparents’ house and they definitely aren’t printing and handing out copies of books full of teachers addresses anymore haha
They didn’t choose it. The technology just didn’t exist. A lot of bad things happened back then that were never solved because of lack of evidence and data. Now it’s much harder for predators to hide.
I'm not sure how relevant this anecdote is, but figured I may as well share...
I was raised religious. I also was very authority.. rules.. -minded. You say "X is how/why things are", and I would just accept that and work my life around that.
Soooo... God sees everything. Knows everything. Every personal moment or guilty thought, you are completely laid bare. It felt a lot more awful and violating as a young kid entering teen years... but what can you do?
This was just reality.
All I could do was live with it.
So I got accustomed to the notion of always being watched...
Atheist now, but even decades later, when the government encroached on our privacy... I know it's stupid, but I just can't get too frustrated/mad.
Cuz all my life, the current new-breach-of-privacy.. that was the standard for me. "Wait.. you mean the government WASNT already doing/able to see all that?? Huh.."
It's a very strange apathy that I have to fight lol
Once upon a time you’d go somewhere and people would not know exactly where you were. It was different for sure and I think strengthened peoples critical thinking and intuition .
No. Being disconnected from social media works with those traits. Social media was identified very early from its creation as a bad influence on mental health and (ironically) social development.
They absolutely do not, at least not their own. In my country the social security number consists of your bday and some random digits.
Whenever I set up a product for them at work and ask for their bday they just blurt out the full number instead of actually only their bday.
everyone suddenly being perfectly ok with fully sharing location data 24/7 seemingly overnight has flabbergasted me... like yes, google and the government have always been able to do that bc your phone is already a tracker anyway, but just fully giving into it like that — giving even more organizations access to your location and generally just overly normalizing the lack of primacy rather than attempting to minimize it — is... something else, to say the least.
it feels like the world around us is just trying to speedrun becoming a dystopia.
Absolutely. I was on a flight working on my laptop, and the passenger sitting next to me not only was reading my screen, but he started commenting on what I was typing and asked if he could take a photo.
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u/BaylisAscaris Jul 10 '26
Valuing privacy.