Privacy Theater Everywhere

Privacy has turned into a word that companies like to say out loud. It shows up on landing pages, in footers, in carefully written blog posts about “trust.” And at the same time, the product is running scripts that quietly talk to half the internet. Nothing about this is hidden. It’s just easy to ignore.

I used to think this was hypocrisy. Now it feels more like routine. Everyone involved knows how this works. The company, the investors, the users. The word “privacy” isn’t there to describe reality. It’s there to make the discomfort tolerable.

It reminds me of those restaurants with signs about hygiene on the wall. The sign isn’t proof of anything. It’s a signal. You see it, you relax a little, and you stop looking too closely. Meanwhile, the cockroach still runs across the floor.

Actual privacy is dull. There’s nothing clever about it. No tracking, no personalization, no optimization. Which also means no growth story, because you can’t sell ads without watching people first. That’s not a moral failure. It’s just how the incentives line up.

This is where the problem gets uncomfortable. People say they want privacy, but they also want free services that work effortlessly. I include myself in that. It’s easier to complain about surveillance than to pay for alternatives or deal with tools that are worse in every visible way.

So the performance continues. Products promise privacy. Users pretend to believe them. Everyone moves on.

At some point, you either accept that tradeoff or you don’t. There’s no dramatic solution hiding here. If you actually want privacy, you turn things off. You host your own. You use tools that don’t need to know you. It’s inconvenient, and most days it doesn’t feel worth it.

This is half-baked, I don't have a conclusive ending for this, I will come back to it later.