- Official Post
You Are Not the Main Character
Your privacy choices affect people around you.
October 18, 2026
Ihave a shocking confession: I have nothing to hide.
- Excluding China and India, men make up slightly less than half the population
- White people make up 10-15% of the global population
- People living in "free" countries make up less than 15% of the global population
- Only 17% of the world could be considered "middle class" as I just used the term
According to my math (which I'm not very good at so take this with a grain of salt), less than .2% of the global population shares my same demographic profile.
That means that the overwhelming majority of the global population is either a minority, living under an authoritarian government, living in a politically hostile environment, poverty, domestic violence situation, etc.
And my choices impact them.
You Are Not the Target, But You Are a Target
One of the most common hand waves to justify not caring about privacy is that "I'm not that interesting." This is both true and false.
It's true that the vast majority of privacy invasions happening these days are completely automated. There's no intern at the NSA reading all your emails or advertising analyst making notes on you by hand.
Some people find this comforting. Somehow it feels less invasive if it's an automated scan rather than a human peering into your life.
But that doesn't change the fact that companies still want YOUR data.
Surveillance capitalism is only effective on a mass scale. Knowing everything about one person isn't useful to a company trying to turn a profit, but knowing everything about large groups of people allows them to find trends and predict behavior.
Companies then weaponize this information against us on an individual level for their own profit. For example:
- Facebook allegedly targets teen girls with beauty ads immediately after said girls deleted their selfies, an indication that they were feeling self conscious about their appearances.
- DraftKings targets problem gamblers who are most likely to lose and thus earn the company money, even if it harms those users financially.
These kinds of abuses are possible because of the vast troves of data companies gather, allowing them to find patterns among the noise.
That includes your data.
No Man Is An Island
It's not just at the macro level. There are choices we make every day that directly impact the people around us and their privacy, without their consent or even knowledge sometimes.
- When you give an app access to your phone's contacts, you're sharing your social network and the contact information of people who haven't consented. You would never randomly hand out your friend's number to strangers on the street, so why are you handing it out to random apps? Can you really name where those apps are sending those numbers or who they're sharing with?
- When you take a DNA test, you're not just learning about your ancestry or medical conditions. You're actually sharing the data of everyone in your family. Family DNA is so similar that these tests have been used in recent years to solve decades-old cold cases. And while that's an example of a positive use of the tech, what happens when that same tech is used to enable racial discrimination?
- Letting apps track your location can reveal who you meet up with and who you're close to. If you spend the night at a house that's not yours, how hard do you think it is for companies to determine - based on who's house it is - if it's a one night stand, looking after a sick friend, or visiting family?
Normalizing Surveillance
In recent years, there's been an increasing normalization of surveillance.
As of 2023, 20% of American homes have a video doorbell installed, with the top brands including Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest.
Ring in particular has drawn immense scrutiny over the years for the vast amounts of data collected and shared with police (usually without the owner's knowledge), though Nest is not without incident.
This problem has only accelerated recently with the proliferation of Meta's smart glasses, the new always-listening Apple Watch, and now Meta's Muse AI assistant.
Meta's smart glasses sold 7 million units in 2025 alone, despite the fact that privacy advocates were pointing out potential problems years ago which have since come to pass:
Women leaving the beach, going into a shop, or simply standing outside are now being approached by men usually wearing Meta's Ray-Bans, the company's "smart" or "AI" glasses, often in order to film the women's responses to casual questions or pick-up lines without their knowledge or consent.
Contractors who review the footage (yup, people do indeed look at that stuff) have reported that users are often unaware what's captured as they review footage of people having sex or using the bathroom.
This year, Apple decided they wanted to get in on the dystopian action by releasing new watches with "Audio Intelligence" that can listen to conversations, make transcripts, and summarize.
Meta's latest viral privacy invasion - their AI assistant called Muse - hearkens back to the Cambridge Analytica days by collecting detailed dossiers of everyone you talk to without their knowledge or consent, thus enabling Muse's measly 4 million users to act on behalf of Meta to scoop up the data of potentially over a billion unconsenting, unwitting people that simply talk to the Muse user.
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If you own or use one of these devices or services, you're sending the images, video, and data of everyone around you back to Meta, Amazon, Google, or Apple without the knowledge or consent of those people.
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If you don't own or use one of these devices or services, your privacy could still be getting scooped up without your knowledge or consent.
Cambridge Analytica
A moment ago I mentioned Cambridge Analytica, and this story deserves a quick recap because it's a textbook example of these issues.
Back in 2016, British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica published a quiz on Facebook called "This is Your Digital Life." The quiz asked users a series of questions in order to build a quick psychological profile of users, but the app was also collecting the Facebook data of quiz-takers. This included profile, page likes, birthday, current city, and in some cases news feed, timeline, messages, and location.
But it didn't stop there. The app also scooped up the data of the Facebook friends of users. In this way, even though only about 270,000 people took the quiz, Cambridge Analytica was able to extract the data of 87 million Facebook users.
The actions of a few hundred thousand people impacted tens of millions for the worse.
Normalizing Privacy
We need to reverse course and stop normalizing surveillance the sharing of other peoples' data. We need to normalize privacy, instead.
Like surveillance capitalism, privacy tools work best at scale.
- The Tor Browser is designed to have many users so everyone blends in.
- End-to-end encryption only works when all parties are using it.
I've written in the past about the benefits of normalizing privacy: how it acts as a type of "herd immunity," makes it a normal default instead of scary techno-wizardry, and makes surveillance uneconomical.
There are a number of privacy tools that you can start using that don't require the participation of others to improve your own privacy but there are also a number of social etiquettes that we should start normalizing among society that don't require us to be tech-savvy.
- Normalize asking friends before posting photos of them or tagging locations
- Normalize using something like Signal to easily blur faces in the background of photos you take before sharing them
- Try to politely steer people toward encrypted messengers as a first option ("Are you on Signal?" before "Are you on Discord?")
- Don't treat privacy-consciousness as punchline (I'm so very tired of "the FBI man watching my phone" memes)
- Politely ask if there are (or suggest) alternatives when workplaces or groups suggest tools like Teams, Google Drive, or Slack.
Privacy is contagious in both directions. Surveillance-free defaults can spread the same way norms around recycling or designated drivers did.
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Companies like Meta, Amazon, and Apple want us to think that their invasive glasses and watches are inevitable but they're not. We can and should push back.
Main Character Syndrome
By default, humans think of ourselves as "the main character." This is completely normal, fueled by a number of cognitive biases. The main two main are:
- The false consensus effect: the tendency to overestimate how much others share your beliefs, behaviors, and characteristics.
- The egocentric bias: relying too heavily on your own perspective and having difficulty imagining others' viewpoints accurately.
But one thing that makes humans special is our ability to consciously change. Once we know that a belief we hold is incorrect, we can choose to believe something else.
You are not an island. You hold pieces of other people's privacy. Even if you have nothing to hide, you can help protect those who do.
