Because infomation is power in the hands of government or malicious, private parties. Lots of personal information ends up online due to how so many people rely on digital communications. For government, there's concern about anything from hiding dissenting behavior (eg gag politician in Red state, organizing protests) to reducing risk of being caught violating one of the thousands of laws/regulations we can't keep track of (eg cops didnt like you or had quotas). For private parties, we already see extortion schemes, identity theft, stalking, fraudulent use of credit cards, discrimination via profiling tech, and so on.
Many, many threats are blocked when Internet tech is private by default. Even selective privacy can block a lot of them. People fighting against privacy online don't care abouf any of that. They'd sacrifice or risk it all for what benefits surveillance state allegedly brings. So far no proof of those benefits either despite billions spent. They should just invest in good-old, police work and HUMINT that got the best results consistently going back before computers were invented.
Many, many threats are blocked when Internet tech is private by default. Even selective privacy can block a lot of them. People fighting against privacy online don't care abouf any of that. They'd sacrifice or risk it all for what benefits surveillance state allegedly brings. So far no proof of those benefits either despite billions spent. They should just invest in good-old, police work and HUMINT that got the best results consistently going back before computers were invented.