Privacy in this day and age

In today's world, every move we make on the internet is being monitored either by the government, companies that can benefit of our data and even people with malicious intent of stealing your credentials. 

There is a very common sentiment that arises in this debate, even among people who are uncomfortable with mass surveillance, which says that there is no real harm that comes from this large-scale invasion because only people who are engaged in bad acts have a reason to want to hide and to care about their privacy. This worldview is implicitly grounded in the proposition that there are two kinds of people in the world, good people and bad people. Bad people are those who plot terrorist attacks or who engage in violent criminality and therefore have reasons to want to hide what they're doing, have reasons to care about their privacy. But by contrast, good people are people who go to work, come home, raise their children, watch television. They use the Internet not to plot bombing attacks but to read the news or exchange recipes and those people are doing nothing wrong and therefore have nothing to hide and no reason to fear the government monitoring them. But a good analogy to explain the situation would be - There is a very common sentiment that arises in this debate, even among people who are uncomfortable with mass surveillance, which says that there is no real harm that comes from this large-scale invasion because only people who are engaged in bad acts have a reason to want to hide and to care about their privacy. This worldview is implicitly grounded in the proposition that there are two kinds of people in the world, good people and bad people. Bad people are those who plot terrorist attacks or who engage in violent criminality and therefore have reasons to want to hide what they're doing, have reasons to care about their privacy. But by contrast, good people are people who go to work, come home, raise their children, watch television. They use the Internet not to plot bombing attacks but to read the news or exchange recipes and those people are doing nothing wrong and therefore have nothing to hide and no reason to fear the government monitoring them. But the one's who are snooping and observing can also get to know about very private details of an individual which they wouldn't necessarily want to share with anyone. This is why privacy and security matter. This is why we need to implement strong encryption and NOT let anyone have a backdoor in the code. Although we may have good intentions as individuals, we can’t rely on the assumption that other individuals will match our same intentions. If we do not hold the companies who are storing our personal information (like our bank, PayPal, Facebook, etc.) accountable and responsible for keeping our information and identify safe, we will willingly be moving into the unknown. Into a digital era where it is more common for a random onlooker to know more about your personal life, financials, and account information than another member of your family. 

This is why more people need to be made aware of open source and privacy respecting software like Tor browser, Searx and online practices like using a proper VPN and encrypted DNS resolvers. One should go through websites like https://www.privacytools.io/ in order to educate oneself about the various ways one can be tracked and how to mitigate that and only then will we be able to avoid a privacy dystopia.