One of the first concepts I learned in 9th grade AP Computer Science Principles is the tradeoff between privacy and convenience.

Web cookies make pages load faster, but also store your information. Google guesses your demographic information with eerie accuracy, but this allows you to get better search results. LLMs rely on context window selection to give you better answers, but who knows what happens to the data you feed it?

Recently, I've felt like privacy is losing the fight.

No, we're not suddenly living in a Orwellian surveillance state (though you could argue China is getting dangerously close). There are undoubtedly ways to protect your privacy — with VPNs, by using AI less frequently, by getting a "dumb" phone. Maybe I live in a tech bubble, but I think the importance of privacy has fallen for the general public.

I see two causes for this: privacy nihilism and convenience. Privacy nihilists are people who have surrendered their privacy because they think it's impossible to protect. I experience the convenience argument significantly more often, though.

Since Spotify launched their Spotify Wrapped feature, we've seen countless other companies doing the same. Tesla has Recharged. Twitch has Recap. Indie developers are making iMessage Wrapped and Twitter Wrapped. In fact, thousands of people have trusted the developer of iMessage Wrapped with full disk access just for a few fun stats.

These are glaring examples of consumers' willingness to give up privacy in convenience.

It's fun to get a data analysis of how you used an app this year. Giving LLMs more context allows you to to get better answers. You get more dopamine when TikTok recommends videos you like.

All this to say, get ready to see a lot more personalization and data-driven features. If you’re a developer, I’d rethink my stance on privacy.

---

Find more of my thoughts on Twitter (@ethanweii).