“Personal data” is something very abstract and most people have little to no idea what it means to give it away. Nowadays it’s getting harder and harder to limit what’s being shared so even those that have a vague understanding of what it means may not care too much.

I don’t have social media accounts and I’ve been using VPNs nonstop for the last 10 years. Degoogled, Firefox, uBlock Origin, PiHole, etc. I got used to this, but it’s a balancing act. I don’t self host. I’m forced to use Windows at work. Credit card for groceries and stuff.

It’s incredibly weird to think how easy it is to create a behavior profile of the average joe. It’s unsettling to imagine companies like Meta and Google have decade’s worth of data on people.

As you said, they shouldn’t share that, but they do. And in places with no way to have that data “erased”, some people will have an unfathomable amount of information about them harvested throughout their whole life.

Even if that data is never used for anything malicious, it’s still disturbing.