I can understand where these young people are coming from, and I'm far from young myself.

I don't pay a lot of attention to Internet privacy issues, but I often feel uneasy when I think about them.

Recently, and mostly because of my work in LGBTQ advocacy, I had reason to write a story about deep-pocketed, conservative Catholic groups that are buying dating-app advertising data on the open market, mining it for location information, then using it to identify and report on Catholic priests they suspect to be gay or engaging in gay trysts.

The Washington Post broke the story. I was just commenting on it from an LGBTQ-privacy perspective, but I repeated claims the Post reporters made that law enforcement agencies all over the U.S. routinely purchase Internet advertising data in open markets and mine it in similar ways, with no oversight, and critically without any need to convince a judge they have probable cause to justify a search warrant.

If groups of vigilante Catholics are able to indentify and track specific priests with this kind of data, what are the cops doing with it? I feel pretty uneasy about that question, really, and much more uneasy than I feel about TikTok and the Chinese government.

I don't personify Zuckerberg as the root of the problem, but I know Meta is part of a much larger problem in Internet privacy.

Learned helplessness? I think so. That Post story (and my own) got very little attention. People seem to feel helpless in the sense that they accept that sacrificing meaningful privacy to use the Internet and social media is how things are and must be.

When the subject of TikTok comes up, some people predisposed to a sort of Cold War mentality go ballistic over China, but I think young people are quite savvy enough to understand that China isn't the major threat to their privacy. That threat is at home, and our political leaders either don't know about it or don't care.