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Just FWIW as someone engaged on academic work on these issues, I broadly agree with your take. That said, two quick points of disagreement -
(1) Even supposedly friendly personalisation can be dangerous. Really effective personalised advertised can boost consumption, but if you're anything like me, you should probably be consuming less. You're like a dieter walking through a buffet restaurant filled with dishes perfectly targeted to your palate. By controlling the data held on you by third parties, you can limit how appealing the menu they offer you is. Now, of course, sometimes it will be your cheat day and you can eat to your heart's content, and having an amazing menu offered to you is positively desirable. But most of the time, having this personalised menu is going to be bad for your ability to achieve your reflectively-endorsed goals. Data privacy is one way to protect yourself from having your own most voracious instincts exploited.
(2) Privacy concerns don't seem to me to be male-coded. If anything, more of my female students are very worried about it. More than anything else, I'd say it skews continental European; Germans above anyone else seem obsessed with it. Brits are radically unconcerned about it.
Wow, okay, good timing. I was just about reserved to believe I was debating with 100 swords pointed at me until this falls below the fold (thanks everyone for engaging!)
What's the line of your academic work?
Well, right from a healthy living perspective, ads that are very targeted and appealing might be a problem. But isn't it said (advocated) that "good ads" are in fact, "content"? If that premise holds, don't we already widely suffer from this problem?
I agree it makes more natural sense that women have higher privacy concerns because there's a lot pervs trying to get inside of their digital devices to exfiltrate nudes (and be otherwise generally creepy). But the level of inconvenience and fringe-ness men take on in pursuit of privacy is more extreme than what women do, in my read.
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