I never cease to be amazed at how naive people are about their personal data. It’s as if identity theft, government misuse of information, and corporate misuse of data, never harmed anyone, anywhere, at any time. It’s a sad reflection on how simple-minded we are as a species that Orwell’s predictions in his novel 1984 were so wide of the mark: never in all his wildest thoughts could he have predicted that Big Brother wouldn’t need to impose technology on us, because we’d be willingly paying for it ourselves.

As for “the necessities of digital life” we don’t actually need social media for very much, and for browsing etc. it’s relatively easy to set up a VPN, proxy server, and various accounts that mask who we are and what we are interested in. Even phones can be suitably privatized should anyone wish to go to the relatively trivial effort to do so.