We’ve heard this a lot throughout the Privacy Project — even from people we found in the data after we showed up on their doorstep! We get it. Many of us have nothing to hide and don’t consider ourselves that important. But what about people who do have some private part of their lives or want more privacy?

None of us really has a choice to participate in tracking or not — the system just serves up location data, usually without us noticing. So for people who do want a bit of privacy — worshipers, young people visiting Planned Parenthood, those visiting a queer space, survivors hiding from an abuser — they no longer have a real choice about their privacy. Because the tracking touches everyone, can we really give up after concluding it’s fine for us? When we participate in this system, we’re tacitly endorsing it.

There’s a great piece we urge everyone to read about how privacy is a collective concern. It really opened our eyes, and perhaps it will for you, too.

The other, more direct answer is that while you don’t care now, you might in the future. Once your location is collected, you’ll never get it back — you’ll never know where it’s gone, who’s bought it, who’s looked at it. What if new scandals give you fresh concern? What if you rose to a position of importance or prominence later? If our data simply leaked online for everyone to see, it could ruin relationships, people could be fired, and so on.

You don’t need to be so concerned today that you throw your phone in the lake. But you can have just enough concern to ask that basic laws get passed to protect people who need protecting from a largely unregulated industry.