Contrary to endless "privacy is dead" predictions, people are making more privacy-conscious decisions in the last few years. Many companies now pitch privacy as a selling point: large ones like Apple, medium-sized ones like Firefox, and smaller ones like DuckDuckGo and Brave.
A nuance worth mentioning: DuckDuckGo and Brave were privacy-focused since their inception (DDG in 2008 and Brave in 2015) whereas Apple and Firefox have moved in a privacy-focused direction in response to shifting attitudes among users leading to a market opportunity.
There have been other recent wins for privacy: most notably, the GDPR. But consumer privacy regulation can only really succeed if it creates incentives that reshape the market. So it's reassuring to see privacy-focused tech companies flourish.
Privacy skeptics often claim there's a "privacy paradox": users say they want privacy but make choices that suggest otherwise. True, most users won't read 5,000-word privacy policies or fiddle with confusing checkboxes. But people *do* choose privacy by picking which apps to use.
Often users have no realistic way to make pro-privacy choices: for example, switching costs may be too high. This is the case in social networks and other apps with strong network effects. So, the fact that people still use Facebook doesn't mean they don't care about privacy.
