People don’t understand how pervasive and extensive the data that companies are gathering on them are. For example, people have told me “Facebook doesn’t know much about me - I never post anything on there”. They don’t realize that Facebook learns so much more about them by just spending time on its website (or even worse - its mobile app) than it could from anything you would realistically post on Facebook (eg: you would likely never post your full contact list, every article you read, when/where you logged into FB, how long you spent on FB, etc.).The longer you’ve had the account and the more time you spend using the account (ie: browsing while logged into the account) the better.,

Additionally, people don’t understand who has their data and what’s being done with it. A common response from most people might be “well, what’s the big deal anyway? They’re gathering ‘all this information about me’ and in return I get to use a free service and get served ads for things I’m actually interested in. That doesn’t seem too bad.” They don’t realize that FB has shown the ability to manipulate people’s thoughts, emotions, and feelings to drive engagement. They don’t realize that because advertisers can target people so well, they are also able to manipulate you far better than they ever could before. They don’t realize that there is a quickly growing several trillion dollar market in personal data collection and there are hundreds/thousands of companies they’ve never heard of that have extremely accurate profiles of them likely with sensitive data that they probably wouldn’t have wanted shared with those companies.

I don’t think that “most people prefer to be spied on”. Instead, in addition to the above points, I think people think that they don’t have an option and that the “spying” is a necessity - maybe even a necessary evil (whether its for security or for the ability to use free services that improve people’s lives). If shown options with the pros/cons clearly laid out where the alternative isn’t too much more complex or inconvenient and handled most of their use cases for the product/service, I do think that there would be a shift in mindset and marketshare. Unfortunately, people are lazy so it would need to be the default option for the alternative(s) to get significant market share. Also, some of these services work so well due to network effects (can’t convince people to use a chat app if they don’t know anyone using the app) which can further complicate the adoption of alternative products/services. Since some of the biggest “spies” are so frequently used by nearly half the world’s population, it makes it extremely challenging to make noticeable changes (eg: “that person is weird for saying I should delete my FB account - everyone is on there. No way that person is right and that everyone is wrong for having an account”, “I want to delete my account, but then I’d be the only one I know without an account”, etc.).

Look at what Apple is doing with recent versions of iOS (and all its marketing). Its making an impact (at least a small one) on companies and people are “caring more” about their privacy. People don’t like being spied on. Hopefully in the coming years people will realize that they’re doing the digital privacy equivalent of switching from soda to juice (old iOS settings vs updated, privacy friendly iOS settings) when they really should’ve been switching to water (stop using as many privacy invasive products/services as possible).