Nothing’s Happened
Nobody tells you it’s okay to not be paranoid about the internet. They tell you the opposite, starting early. Your parents, your teachers, whatever authority figure is nearby—they all recite the same warning: don’t share your data, don’t trust anyone online, once it’s out there, you’re compromised. You become a commodity. A profile in some server, just your likes and dislikes, waiting to be weaponized by people you’ll never meet.
I heard it all, and I believed it for a while. Privacy was sacred, data was dangerous, the internet was the one place you had to be careful.
Then I got older and stopped listening.
For more than ten years now, I’ve been systematically putting my entire life on the internet. Every platform that’s existed—Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, every dating app, every forum, every corner of the web where you could leave a trace of yourself. What I eat. Where I went to school. Who I’ve been with. What I listened to today. The bands I actually like versus the ones I pretend to like. Long detailed entries about fights with friends I thought nobody was reading. The weird porn I watch late at night instead of socializing like a normal human. Everything. I’ve been almost stupidly honest about it, like the whole thing was a confessional and I didn’t care who was listening.
And in all that time? Nothing. Not a damn thing has happened.
I haven’t been stalked. My location history hasn’t been weaponized against me. I haven’t lost an opportunity because Google knew too much. I haven’t been blackmailed or identified or put in danger. My life hasn’t gotten worse. There’s been no actual harm, no injury, no real consequence.
I get why people are afraid. The idea of some algorithm knowing I prefer pizza to doner meat, or cataloguing every embarrassing search I’ve ever done, every late-night rabbit hole—yeah, that’s genuinely unsettling. There’s something gross about some company building a file on you to sell to someone else. It should feel gross. But understanding why something is gross and actually experiencing harm from it are two different things.
The worst-case scenario I’ve been able to construct, even stretching my imagination to find a realistic outcome, is personalized advertising. That’s it. Relevant ads instead of random ones. And honestly? I can almost laugh about that being my dystopia. My greatest enemy is a targeted ad.
Everything else is theoretical. Someday someone somewhere might use my data to hurt me. Might. Someday. Someone. Maybe. It’s all conditional, all if-if-if, and the longer I live online without anything bad happening, the harder it gets to stay afraid.
There’s a moral panic that’s built up around internet privacy, and I think a lot of it is just that—panic, not reason. We’re supposed to be terrified. We’re supposed to hide. We’re supposed to live in constant anxiety, waiting for the day it all falls apart. But I’ve been living on the internet with no filter for over a decade now, and I’m still here. Still fine. Still myself, whatever that costs me.