I understand and even appreciate that people have different priorities, worries and preferences. Which is why I dislike the attitude some take, "if you don't care about X, you're part of the problem". It may even be true in lots of cases, but we can't all care about the same things, less we all worry about everything all the time, and that's not good or realistic.
Funny thing though. I've seen people have civil debates about the most sensitive, divisive topics, as long as the initial question or statement comes from a place of genuine curiosity.
But whenever I see people ask the "why is privacy important?" question, it's never just "am I missing something?" but more of a "gimme all the ads, collect everything about me, I don't care", sometimes with the "you conspiracy theorists weirdos, nobody cares about you and you're probably pedos anyway" sprinkled in.
So it's a bit tiring to see this over and over, hence my snark at the beginning. And I don't know where the attitude is coming from. Maybe it's just a relatively new issue and people aren't used to constantly being exposed to the debate, like with some other topics?
But in that case I gather that it should be the opposite problem - we used to have much more privacy than we have now, that just has to be obvious (hence the questions in the first place), so the proper question to ask would be "wait, why is everyone so interested in everything I do all of a sudden? Why is every corporation suddenly collecting all my data and giving me free stuff in return while raking in billions of profits? Hm, sus"
Eh maybe I'm missing something.
Point taken... Altho personally I don't care about how old someone is. When I game online or just squat on Lemmy/Reddit/forum, I'm fine taking to people whether they're 13 or 70. If anything, younger people tend to be more open minded, which possibly comes with having access to all the information.
But yea I guess some topics probably hit different when you grow up in a certain style of environment. Still, when I babysit kids, I find they are curious about everything and are willing to change their mind if they get explained something realistically. And I don't see younger people ask loaded questions as often as older folks do.
I don't begrudge people for not knowing things. What I find interesting is how they react when they learn about something, or their initial train of thought. You probably know the experiment of asking randos "should dihydrohen monoxide be banned?"
I have this hobby almost, I like finding new things, weird and divisive stuff. Oddball topics, weird fetishes, strange habits, crazy hobbies, wild art, whatever. If there's a community with "weird" in the title, I'll probably subscribe to it.
And it also gives me some insight into how outsiders react when they stumble upon that stuff. Most people, when confronted with something out of their ordinary, tend to go "damn good thing I'm normal, everyone is weird" or worse. So I guess it is human nature, but you can also imagine how tiring it can get.