Deepfakes are significantly different from traditional photo and video editing. I have a degree in photography and I have worked professionally as a video editor. The technology is vastly different, but the most important difference is that the technology has the potential to allow people with little skill or time required to produce videos where someone convincingly appears to be doing and saying things they didn’t do or say. That’s new and that’s dangerous.
You’re right that online and retail tracking are difficult to defend against. Amazon has a wealth of data about me and the products I’m interested in, and I don’t like that. But that’s a decision I’ve made. I’ve given Google next to no data about me in the last ~7 years. I don’t directly use any Google services except YouTube, don’t have a Google account, and I access YouTube in such a way that it’s next to impossible for them to connect it to any of my other online activities, or to my actual identity for that matter. Screw Google. I don’t have a Facebook account and I seldom use Twitter. Cox and the feds can’t see most of my internet activity because it’s encrypted and routed through other countries.
About the only thing I buy at Target is peanut butter, and I buy a ton of it sometimes because they have various combinations of sales and coupons that make it really cheap and we eat a lot of it. They probably think I’m pretty weird because every few months I buy like 30 jars of peanut butter from them and nothing else. I don’t care if they know that and I even use my Target REDcard to get an extra 5% off, which makes it super easy for them to track all my PB purchases. I also buy hardly anything at Walmart. I regularly buy large amounts of vinegar, baking soda, and washing soda there for cleaning and laundry. I also don’t care that anyone knows that. At any store other than Amazon, if I’m going to search their website for something that I don’t usually buy from them, I do it in an anonymous way.
Spying on electricity use, as far as I’m aware, is largely limited to fairly rudimentary analysis of when you’re at home versus when you’re away, or what appliances you might be using at a given time. I don’t like that, but there’s not much I can do about that without disconnecting from the grid (future plan, but quite a ways off).
There are a lot of invasions of our privacy we can’t do anything about, but that’s no reason for me to throw up my hands and give up. There’s a lot we can do something about. No matter what, I see no reason to give anyone an easy opportunity to see or hear what goes on in my home without my permission, or to make deepfake child porn using a collection of photos of my kids found online. Not everyone has the background, skills, determination, and tolerance for inconvenience that I have that help me in my efforts toward privacy, but I caution people all the time not to give up on privacy. The potential consequences of doing so are only going to get worse over the next several years.
