Yes, it's arguably impossible to leave no digital footprint. You must often provide information to sites, in order to get what you want, especially where there's money involved. And sites collect whatever other information they can, with very little oversight or recourse. Except maybe in the EU Add AI to that, and it starts to seem totally unmanageable. Still, you can compartmentalize. Consider the "right to be forgotten". Well, I (the meatspace identity typing this) don't worry about that, because I never say anything online that would ever need to be forgotten. Nothing. And honestly, I don't say much of anything at all. Nothing in social media except stuff like "happy birthday" and whatever (in my native language). Even Mirimir is pretty careful about what he says. Although he has lost it a few times Anything that I'd want to be forgotten, I say as some throwaway persona. Also, using VPNs and Tor and VMs and so on, I make it hard to link all those personas to meatspace me, or to each other. With effort proportional to the potential consequences of linkage. I do get that most people don't have expertise or time for that stuff, and don't enjoy those games. But still, it's not that hard to use VPNs for torrenting etc, and Whonix for other stuff. The footprints are all still there, except where browser add-ons and Tor browser can protect. But they're footprints from different shoes, and are parts of unrelated paths.
You shouldnt have to do all that just to protect your fundimental right to choose what you make public about yourself and what you dont. Several politicians have said, in defence of this data mining, that people never had privacy, suggesting therefore that privacy activists are making a fuss about nothing. Well the politicians are lying. If you sent a letter in the mail, you could be sure that letter was private. No one would open it except the recipient unless a warrant was issued by a judge because it is a federal crime to do otherwise. If you wanted information on a subject you would go to the library. No one recorded which books you looked at. If you watched tv no one recorded which tv shows you watched. If you bought a news paper or magazine there was no record of what you read about. ONLY on the internet is our ability to do any of the above in private, being interfered with and and as the internet has taken over as the main access point for all those activities, the violation of our right to privacy has to be taken seriously.
@RockLobster -- Well, I guess that you're talking about the US, and maybe parts of the EU. But even there, those ideals weren't always honored in practice. Not in wartime, certainly. When dealing with national security threats, pretty much never. I mean, national intelligence services got copies of all telegraph and teletype messages. First as paper tapes, and later various generations of digital copies. This was typically done informally, off the record. Top management wasn't informed. Technical staff served as national-security agents, generally through patriotism, but sometimes paid. Mail, especially to/from foreigners, was routinely monitored. I get that from Bamford's books. However, in-person conversation was always potentially private, given adequate OPSEC. And there's nothing comparable on the Internet, except with some messaging apps. And even with those, keeping metadata private remains problematic.
