Americans are not happy with exchanging personal data for various services. Rather, they think they don't have a choice — that companies will get the data anyway.

Here are more details.

Those despairing people are right in a narrow sense: refusing to use one site, on one occasion, won't get them control of their data. But it is an error to conclude that it is hopeless to resist. Rather, you need to resist consistently — but that's not really hard. I do it, and you can do it.

Beyond individual resistance, we can organize to require companies to respect our privacy, even to stop asking us for data.