If you hit up abuse survivors subs, you’ll come across the technique of “grey rocking”, and what it’s used for. If you honestly, truly want to understand why privacy is important, take a few months (yes, I do mean months–learning isn’t accomplished by a pithy two-sentence quip), and read the stories of abuse survivors. Pretty much all of them will have examples of how people in their lives used their knowledge of them to harm them in some way.
Basically, there are malevolent people out there, abusive people, who can and will take ANY info about you, and twist it around until it’s a weapon to be used. It doesn’t really matter what the info is–there’s ways to twist anything.
I was an A and B student in high school that never got into trouble, or did drugs, or got knocked up (I was pretty much the teacher’s pet because I didn’t need help and also didn’t get bored and act up, so I was an “easy” student) and somehow my uncle, who had unresolved trauma of his own and disliked I didn’t crown him “daddy” the first month I came to live with him, found reasons to permanently ground me for most of 3 years. (I mention school because I used it as a touchstone to figure out if there really was a reason to demonize me at home…I figured if the teachers weren’t constantly handing out detentions to me, and seemed to think I was a decent kid, then it must be home that was wrong.)
The most effective technique to deal with people weaponizing info about you on you is to cut off their source of information. This is something abuse survivors have generally found. When you live with unreasonable people, finding something that WORKS (outside of pie-in-the-sky ideals) is important.
Withholding info is pragmatic and helps blunt the effect of the attacks. When living in an abusive home, “grey rocking” means you give little to no information about your daily life to the abuser, and it’s called “grey rocking” because you act as interesting as a rock. (Even then, they’ll use that shutting off of the wellspring of info as evidence that you’re “abusing them with your silence” or something. But at least they won’t learn of your promotion at work and use that to beg you for money, or learn that you like some pop song and decide out of thin air it means you’re a slut that just got knocked up, or that you’re doing drugs, or that…blah blah blah.)
But the same people who are abusive in private homes also have jobs, are even in government. Those people don’t exist in just one sphere, they exist in others, with the same mindset that causes them to treat their “loved ones” poorly.
They’re not going to just give up their shitty ways. I mean, even if you haven’t had shitty partners or parents, you’ve probably run into those people in school or at work as bad managers. The people who, if they had surveillance info on you, would absolutely use it on you if they had the least bit of reason to.
And the way of dealing with them, pragmatically, remains the same, whether it’s abusive people in your family or abusive people who are managers or in government. You strangle their source of information. They can still lie about you (and often will), but it’s harder to make up plausible lies that other people will swallow if they don’t have enough information on you to get a good angle for it.