I have been thinking a lot lately how easy it is to find evidence that Microsoft is tracking you and your operating system usage and also how widely this is denied in many quarters. I have been trying to understand that strange phenomenon — what causes the willful ignorance and why many people are so eager to deny all evidence that it’s occurring.

This bit from Shoshan Zuboff’s new book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, gets closer to the heart of it than anything I’d syncretized so far.

Our dependency is at the heart of the commercial surveillance project, in which our felt needs for effective life vie against the inclination to resist its bold incursions. This conflict produces a psychic numbing that inures us to the realities of being tracked, parsed, mined, and modified. It disposes us to rationalize the situation in resigned cynicism, create excuses that operate like defense mechanisms (“I have nothing to hide”), or find other ways to stick our heads in the sand, choosing ignorance out of frustration and helplessness. In this way, surveillance capitalism imposes a fundamentally illegitimate choice that twenty-first-century individuals should not have to make, and its normalization leaves us singing in our chains.

This disputation of the bleeding obviousness of Microsoft’s pervasive surveillance in their new OSes (and retrofitted into older OSes) is I think one of those excuses that operate as a defense mechanism. “Oh, Mike is crazy, he thinks Microsoft is gathering data all the time. Ha, loser!” This despite the fact that it really is not hard to intercept and log DNS requests and do packet captures to see all the data that is being actively exfiltrated.

Mockery and denial is also a method of avoiding responsibility and useful for breaking out of paralyzing cognitive dissonance. If they really were able to make themselves believe the clear truth of OS-level surveillance, they might have to do something about it, to take some action. It’s just easier to believe what they wish to rather than the evidence; seems a common state of human affairs.