Why Doesn’t Gen Z Care About Privacy?

You can’t miss what you’ve never had.

Depending on who you ask, I’m either one of the oldest members of Gen Z or one of the youngest millennials. Which turns out to be a strangely useful place to stand.

I’m just old enough to remember when privacy wasn’t something people talked about because it was simply… normal. You went to a friend’s house without anyone tracking your location. You made embarrassing mistakes that weren’t immortalized in someone’s camera roll. You could reinvent yourself without wondering whether an employer, a stranger, or an algorithm would someday dig up a version of you that no longer existed.

I’m also young enough to have watched all of that quietly disappear.

Today, it’s easy to dismiss privacy as something older generations romanticize. Every new technology asks for a little more access than the last. Parents can track their kids through apps like Life360. Neighborhoods are lined with connected doorbell cameras. Schools can monitor activity on district-issued devices. Every concert, every party, every awkward interaction in public comes with the possibility that someone nearby is recording.

The usual explanation is that Gen Z traded privacy for social media, convenience, and attention. That gets the story backwards. Rather than simply rejecting privacy, Gen Z came of age in a world where tracking, recording, and information sharing were already becoming routine.

You can’t miss what you never had.

Born Inside the Panopticon

In the late eighteenth century, Jeremy Bentham designed a model prison that he called the panopticon. An inspector’s lodge stood at the center, surrounded by radiating spokes that contained prison cells. From inside those cells, prisoners wouldn’t be able to see the inspector but he could see them, and so they had to assume they were being watched.

Bentham believed the possibility of observation alone would eventually cause prisoners to modify their own behavior. They would begin surveilling themselves. 

Gen Z didn’t choose the panopticon. We were simply among the first generations to grow up surrounded by technologies that made monitoring ordinary.

Most of this wasn’t imposed on us with sinister intentions. Quite the opposite. School monitoring software is generally intended to protect students or manage school technology. Location sharing can reassure parents or make it easier to find your friends. Doorbell cameras might catch the person stealing your packages. Each trade, considered on its own, sounds reasonable.

It’s the cumulative effect that’s disturbing.

Spend enough of your life under those conditions and it becomes easier to stop asking, “Why are we all being watched?” and start asking, “Why would anyone want out?”

If privacy has rarely been the default, it can start to look less like freedom and more like secrecy.

And secrecy invites another question: What do you have to hide?

If You Have Nothing to Hide…

“If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” is one of those ideas so deeply embedded in our culture that it sounds like common sense. If you’re not doing anything wrong, why care who’s watching?

It hasn’t always been that way. Popular culture has long used constant observation as a source of unease. You can see it in some of the last century’s most enduring stories.

George Orwell published 1984 in 1949, and surveillance is central to the totalitarian society it depicts. Decades afterward came movies like The Truman Show, Enemy of the State, and Minority Report, each imagining in different ways what happens when other people or institutions gain extraordinary visibility into an individual’s life.

The technology and circumstances differ, but these stories draw some of their tension from the same place: losing control over who can observe you and what they can do with what they learn.

The “nothing to hide” argument fits neatly into that world because it changes what privacy is for. Privacy stops being about control over who gets access to you and becomes a means of concealing something from them. Once privacy means concealment, wanting it can begin to look suspicious.

The burden shifts almost without anyone noticing. Instead of asking why a company, government, school, stranger, or website needs access to some part of your life, you find yourself explaining why you’d rather they didn’t have it.

Maybe we’ve been asking the wrong question.

Why does everyone else feel so entitled to that access?

Privacy Isn’t Dead. We’ve Just Made It Feel Impossible.

There’s another reason resignation comes so easily: we’ve developed a fairly absurd idea of what being “private” is supposed to look like.

Mention digital privacy and the caricature appears almost immediately. Delete your social media accounts. Stop carrying a smartphone. Pay for everything in cash. Move to a cabin. Presumably start growing your own food.

Measured against that standard, nearly everyone has already failed.

But perfect privacy is a standard we seem to apply to almost nothing else. We don’t consider a locked front door useless because somebody could break a window.

Information about you can exist without being easy to find. There’s a meaningful difference between a determined person uncovering something after hours of searching and a stranger typing your name into Google and quickly finding a profile containing personal details about you.

Most of us don’t need to become invisible. We need more control over how easily information about us can be found.

That is a much more manageable problem. Removing exposed information from data broker sites is one place to start. Being more deliberate about what becomes public in the first place is another. None of it produces perfect privacy. Perfect privacy was never a particularly useful standard to begin with.

Resignation Isn’t Indifference

There’s a temptation to look at younger generations and conclude that they simply don’t care about privacy. It’s a comforting explanation. It places the blame on the people who inherited the problem rather than the environment they grew up in.

But resignation and indifference aren’t the same thing.

The data bears this out. Cisco found that 40 percent of people aged 18 to 34 have exercised their formal data rights, asking companies what they have on them and requesting they delete it, versus 15 percent of consumers aged 55 to 64.

Someone who says “everyone already has my data anyway” may not be saying privacy has no value. They may simply have no idea what they’re supposed to do about it.

We’ve spent years treating privacy as though it were a battle that ended before we arrived. It didn’t. What remains is less dramatic than disappearing from the internet, and far more ordinary: having some say over how readily other people can find information about us.

You can’t miss what you never had.

But you can decide to get some of your agency back.

Ready to take back control? See what information about you is exposed online and start removing it with DeleteMe.