Personally I feel more easy minded because I know that whatever I do online leaves as little trace as usual. If I go out by myself say for a drive and I get back home I expect no one to ever know that I went away and where unless I decide to say so. Same goes for online activity. I would expect nothing to be tied to me and whatever I do to go unnoticed unless for some reason I agree with sharing such data. It's often said though that with privacy comes less convenience and that is true: not having app features ready before you even ask or easily paying or doing other things online so I see how wanting convenience over privacy can be preferable. For me though, the point I made in the beginning is stronger and motivates me.

Also on a side note I watched a video from Louis Rossman where he talked about some kind of police radio going stolen and the authorities went ask google for people in that area that searched that specific model online to help track that person down so... yeah, I'm already not a fan of leaving traces I don't want to leave. Let alone those that might make the authorities mistake me for a criminal.

Personally I'm trying to be as offline and anonimous as possible. I'm moving away from cloud storage and if a service can be used with a client without an account where I can locally save and back up things I like then I'm using that. The biggest challenge right now is youtube as a platform with that huge of a content and a decent algorithm for suggestions is yet to be created.

There's no one-liner that will make the importance of privacy "click" for most people, since it requires a bit of abstract thought, but this site is the closest I've seen to it: https://www.socialcooling.com

If you want to do something about it, check out privacyguides.org, or the lemmy community (and instance) run by its owner, !privacyguides@lemmy.one

I'm sure there is a LOT of additional information about "what you can do", but here are some very simple starting points. You can do these today if you want.

1. Only use Firefox with uBlock Origin installed/active for web browsing.
2. Use a Virtual Private Network (VPN). https://protonvpn.com is considered one of the best.
3. Turn off location services on your phone (this will probably be controversial but I think it makes a lot of sense).

For more, subscribe to @privacy and read and support eff.org

Best wishes!

Besides what other people are saying, big data is a thing, sometimes there are correlations no one is aware of, but an unbiased algorithm finds. Let me give you two facts:

1. Insurance companies analyse personal history as well as general statistics when determining if they'll accept you and how much they'll charge you. e.g. a White middle aged man with some family history of heart problems will have a much higher price than a Black young woman without family history. This does not limit to insurance companies, banks can choose to not give you a loan based on any factors they choose, in fact any private business can do it.

2. Some of the companies that do big data can predict that you're pregnant even before you know it, just basing on random factors like search queries and email contents. Think about this for a moment, you don't know that you're pregnant, but because you searched certain terms (even if they're completely unrelated to pregnancy) a company can know it. This is also true of other stuff, but because currently this is used for ads there's not much reason to specialise this to find things like health or financial conditions.

It's not unlikely that in the future insurance companies could buy that data and use it as an extra point of data to give you a quote or to deny you entirely. And this would be something like In average, 90% of people living in NY who search for the price of a flight to Rome within a couple of days of sending an email with the words "cigarette" and "help" suffer a heart attack within 5 years, so because you're trying to help a friend quit his cigarette addiction and are planning to visit Rome your insurance just went up, because there is a 90% chance you'll have a heart attack within some years based on big data analysis.

If you comply with their interests, nothing. Once you do anything that even looks like being against their interests, they use this data. There are programs of called DARPA LifeLog which literally logs everything. They even create DeepFakes based on the data they collect, ofc, not officially.

Yes, never give any data more than you need to give and move towards free and minimal software.

Alternatives

Do you want to leave trace in your live, or will you disappear without a trace :v

...

I used to care, but I gave in

All my life I give up all my data to any product of any company I use. I accept all cookies to track me, send auto-reports and telemetry, try to join all beta products and gladly report bugs that occur. I use one nickname everywhere it is available, my home address and phone number and all social network pages are easily googlable, all my profiles are public. I always say what I think. I'm from Kyiv, Ukraine, and I have never had a single negative occasion due to my Internet behavior. AMA.