You don’t actually want privacy. I don’t mean that as an insult; I meant it as an observation of how the vast majority of people use their tech.
The moment you start a conversation about data collection, surveillance capitalism, or big tech’s tracking practices, you’ll find people getting angry—and for good reason. The phones, apps, TVs, and just about every piece of tech we use track us digitally in some way, shape, or form. Even private browsing isn’t private—and it never was.
The frustrating truth is that privacy-friendly alternatives exist everywhere. Hardware, software, services, they’re all here, ready to use. The reason we don’t use them isn’t that they don’t exist. It’s because convenience wins. Every single time.
Convenience is the enemy of privacy
Our need for speed, ease, and comfort silently dismantles every privacy habit we try to build
Consider all the privacy-first software options we have today. Signal exists. It’s a free, open-source messaging app that offers real encryption. But how many people use it compared to WhatsApp or Telegram? According to Statista, WhatsApp had 3 billion monthly active users as of October 2025, with Telegram coming in at nearly 1 billion. Signal didn’t even make the list of the most popular mobile messaging apps in 2025. It still has millions of active users, but the number is nowhere close to giants like WhatsApp.
Why the disparity despite Signal offering the same experience with superior privacy? Because your friends and family already use WhatsApp and Telegram. Starting fresh with Signal means asking everyone to switch to a completely new messaging app and losing all their old messages.
Want to avoid Google? Switch to DuckDuckGo or Brave Search. Both are decent alternatives that don’t build detailed digital profiles of you when in use. But Google search is so integrated into Android, so seamless in Chrome, that not using it requires constant vigilance. If you want to switch, you have to deliberately choose a different option every single time. Most people don’t want that. They want to look up their web searches and move on with their lives, so they take the path of least resistance.
Similarly, privacy-focused email providers like ProtonMail or Tutanota exist. They offer better encryption, security, and anonymity options. But they’re not Gmail. They’re not synchronized across three devices, and they don’t have the same email recovery options if you forget your password. They require you to be more technically competent, more careful, and more intentional.
None of these privacy-focused alternatives is difficult to use, but they’re a departure from the cosy, convenient layouts that we’re used to seeing in our daily lives. For a lot of people, using a privacy-focused alternative is more hassle and more friction than they’d like to deal with.
Hardware to protect your privacy
Tools alone can’t fix human behavior
The same story carries over to hardware. You can buy phones from companies that prioritize privacy. You can even install a different OS like LineageOS or GrapheneOS on your phone and Linux on your PC. With a little bit of effort and research, you can use open-source programs and OSes that save you money and respect your data from top to bottom. And yet, the majority of people still buy iPhones and Samsungs running standard Android, then complain about privacy.
Why? Because “just use Linux” isn’t helpful advice anymore. The privacy-conscious alternatives require sacrifices. They don’t support certain apps, don’t integrate smoothly with existing ecosystems, they’re not updated as frequently, don’t have super user-friendly UIs, and sometimes break. They don’t “just work” in the way a consumer piece of hardware and software does.
Windows might track every move you make, but it’s the default experience on just about every computer you can buy. A Chromebook might sell your entire browsing history to advertisers, but it boots instantly and rarely crashes with cryptic terminal messages. They also come with software you’ve likely already used or heard of. A computer with a privacy-respecting Linux distro requires you to figure out your own software stack, and that’s not what most people want to spend their time doing.
If privacy matters so much, why don’t we act like it?
The psychology, laziness, and systemic design choices that keep us exposed even when we know better
What we actually value is convenience, followed closely by price. Privacy is somewhere far down the list, probably tied with aesthetics. We say we want privacy because it sounds good, it sounds right. But we care about it the way we care about exercise or having a healthy diet. It’s something we think we want, but doing it requires breaking old habits, figuring out new methods of doing our tasks, and not something we prioritize when we’ve got real deadlines to meet.
The privacy-conscious person is the one who carries two phones, uses different web browsers for different purposes, syncs nothing to the cloud, and manually manages backups. They can’t call their non-tech friend because they switched to something their friend has never heard of. That person exists, but they’re the exception, not the norm. As one of those people, I’m exhausted.
Does this mean privacy doesn’t matter? No. It means we need to stop pretending we want it more than we actually do. It means we need to stop pretending we want it more than we actually do. It also means we should recognize that the real privacy-respecting choice isn’t necessarily the best choice for a given person’s life right now.
4 Ways Using a Smartphone Has Actually Improved My Privacy
A device that tracks you can still, somehow, be your best defense against tracking.
Most of all, it means being honest. For the average person, privacy exists at the intersection of access, convenience, and cost. Currently, genuine privacy necessitates a sacrifice on at least one of these axes. Until that changes, most of us will continue to say we care about privacy while using the convenient option. That’s not hypocrisy. That’s just being human.