The most basic of searches will lead one to articles explaining that there exist various ways of achieving online privacy. At which point one can keep exploring, or ask computer literate friends for recommendations.
If somebody spends a decent amount of time on various social sites, is concerned about privacy, and yet does not do this, their primary missing ingredient is motivation. Nothing in the world can compensate for a lack of self-agency.
(Not even money as you initially lamented, since it means you're actually more valuable to surveil)
The real problem is the vast majority have no idea about any of this. They don't even know their privacy is being violated, it's a completely foreign concept.
We're forced to learn about and deal with bills, taxes, insurance, legal issues, etc. Our society just needs to realize that technology related privacy falls into this category too.
I actually think the vast majority does know their privacy is being violated, but just assumes that's how Internet use goes. They trust that minimizing their reliance on it for "important" things will minimize their exposure, while also not understanding the extent to which surveillance has taken over the physical world.
But alas this doesn't really apply to somebody who seemingly knows their privacy is being violated enough to complain, yet doesn't bother to take straightforward steps to rectify that.
A VPN will certainly not defeat NSA mass surveillance, and likely not adtech's surveillance. But it will most definitely force an ISP to remain a dumb pipe, which is what's under discussion here.
> I actually think the vast majority does know their privacy is being violated
No, I don't think they do. They don't understand how grocery store loyalty cards work or how that data ends up at Facebook as part of their profile.
They might understand that clicking "like" sends a signal to Facebook, but they don't understand that the Facebook they see is slightly different than the Facebook I see because we are both being subjected to different social experiments.
They don't need to know the specific details of what is collected or how it is cataloged to fundamentally be aware that their actions are being recorded. I shouldn't have said "violated" because they're so disempowered they aren't aware that there is a choice.
