Comment by blackbrokkoli
6 years ago
(...)a recently graduated researcher at Harvard who set out to test the privacy paradox.
His conclusion: We do care about our privacy, even if we don’t always act in our best interests.
FYI: This is the privacy paradox. The author seems to assume it means that people just don't care...which wouldn't be paradox. No, the idea is that people rate privacy very high or even place a lot of value in it in sandbox behavior experiments, like the one described in the article. Thus it is surprising how people then behave "in the wild", There are a lot of theories about the Why, which I recommend you to read up upon if interested.
It would help and also show professionalism IMO if the author wouldn't just link other oversimplified articles from NYT when quoting science...
Simple explanation for the "Why" is that caring about something takes mental resources, and our consumerist free market is optimized towards extracting all our available mental cycles and put them either to produce or to consume, for the benefit of the companies that make up the economy.
Life is easier if you just follow the script and go along. Any remaining resources for "caring" about your life and your best interests must be detracted from the race to make a living, and not everyone is in a financial position to afford that luxury. Quite a departure from the vision of the founding fathers who designed our political system, who were people in a position to care for such things.