It's not just about tech. People simply don't care about freedom or privacy any more. They're happy to give it all up if it means that an ever-expanding nanny state will care for them and protect them from all harm, whether it be international terrorism, cigarettes, or insults being hurled online.
The campaign to brand freedom ('freedumb') as a far-right ideal certainly isn't helping.
People simply don't care about freedom or privacy any more.
I don't believe that's true. Our younger generations are way more savvy about those things than our older ones.
What I do see is a sense of hopeless inevitability. People don't feel they can escape the surveillance and other technological dangers because everyone is at it. Both of our major political parties are generally supportive of the police and surveillance state and no-one else has any realistic prospect of forming a government at national level. Unless you give up a large part of modern life and decide not to participate in large parts of our society you have little real choice but to pick your poison from the big tech firms as well.
So people resist in less obvious ways like moving between services and creating new accounts frequently with false details. People from younger generations hardly ever commit to any single account on any service the way their parents or grandparents did. They have no time for terms and conditions that require real identities. (Or the service will do what exactly? Terminate the account they didn't really care about or expect to use for long anyway?) I imagine a lot of young people already know how to use a VPN and probably more will start doing so over time. I wonder how many phones the average teenager really has today.
Of course this attitude creates other problems of its own. With modern tech but little personal accountability we see issues like cyberbullying becoming real problems for our schoolkids for example. Unfortunately the only answer the politicians can seem to think of to deal with a problem like that is trying to be even more authoritarian. We need to do better than that.
I think some of this is selection bias - for many their local peers of similar age are often in the same industry, and of similar education backgrounds. I assume on a site like this it's likely tech-aligned.
Most people do NOT know how to use a VPN, and barely know how to use computers outside of their walled garden app based devices. I'm not sure if there's really much of a difference by age.
The UK's left/right split is very different to that of the US.
In particular, surveillance is extremely popular with both of the big UK parties. Well, I say "big", we'll see if the Tories even manage to win a single seat at the next election — I think they're currently expected to get just under 100 seats, but they're so dysfunctional that total disintegration is absolutely possible between now and then.
The campaign to brand freedom ('freedumb') as a far-right ideal certainly isn't helping.