The EFF has a page called Leaving the Physical World, and the framing alone is worth sitting with. We're not adding digital tools on top of physical life anymore. We're migrating. Identity, money, relationships, work, memory — all of it is shifting into systems we don't own and barely understand.
The uncomfortable part is how casually it happened. Nobody asked us to vote on storing our faces with three cloud providers or letting an ad network mediate our friendships. We just clicked through. The defaults won. And every default carries an assumption about who gets to watch, log, monetise, or shut you out.
What makes EFF's framing useful is that it stops treating privacy as a feature request. It treats it as a habitat question. If you're going to live somewhere — and we are, increasingly, living online — then property rights, due process, and the ability to be left alone aren't optional. They're load-bearing.
My take: stop thinking of digital hygiene as paranoia and start thinking of it as basic tenancy. Know your landlord, read the lease, and keep a key to your own door.
