The way I look at it is, the more information is known about you the easier it is for someone or something to predict/manipulate you.

Now sure this can be beneficial to you if that someone/something is a looking out for your best interest or at least is looking for a mutual benefit solution. However the vast majority of the online world isn't looking out for your best interest they just want your time and your money.

Because of this try and keep private. I do my best to block ads and trackers and just be careful about where I am giving out my real information. I think this has helped me avoid buying crap I really don't need and helping avoid scams as is hard to fall for a scam when they think your Name is Tommy Baker living at a Walmart address in California.

Being private I feel will also help you with social media addition. I spend less time on YouTube/Reddit/Lemmy or wherever if I am not logged in vs if I am logged in. Simply because my accounts are very personalized to me thus it does a better job suggesting content I would be interested in looking at. (Sucking up my time)

People are often not aware that privacy is synonymous with security on the Internet. Now, 100% privacy does not exist, but we must differentiate between what any page we visit can find out, mainly technical data, such as our public IP if we do not use a VPN, but which allows the page to be presented in our language, why The public IP reveals the country in which we live, but not our exact location, only that of our ISP service, which may be hundreds of km away. Also data such as our OS, mobile or PC, which allows the page to adjust the format.

Another different thing is our private data, this is what must be protected on the front line, since a leak as has already happened on several occasions, where hundreds of thousands of sensitive data were leaked, including banking and medical data. Protecting these depends primarily on our common sense and discretion on the network. We cannot prevent authorities from accessing this data that our ISP, Doctor or Bank may provide them if there is a court order for this, but we can prevent individuals or companies from tracking and profiling us in order to sell this data to third parties ( urveillance advertisings), since in this case we have no control over how this data is processed and protected in the hands of third parties, it is precisely there where these massive data leaks occurred.

Countermeasures, apart from our own caution and discretion as the most important thing, there are all kinds of measures such as ad/trackerblocker, VPN (especially with public WiFi) and others, not using the mobile phone for banking transactions (convenient, but a mobile phone can never offer the same security such as from a PC, or better to do the procedures in person), use long passwords and 2FA, or better a physical key, such as a pendrive, although it is annoying, ALWAYS read the TOS and PP of a software or service, (even if it is FOSS!), there we can discover the biggest surprises that we later regret.

Use tools, such as Exodus and InVizible Pro on Mobile, Blacklight, Webkoll, Portmaster, PiHole, etc., to find out who is looking over your shoulder using an app or service, test your browser with Browserleaks, to see the holes it may have, adjust it accordingly, and never use search engines that log and track activity.

There are lots of people who really need their privacy. If I can add my noise to the background and protect a journalist, whistleblower, etc... 👍

Being able to developer a personality, your personality, yourself basically.

IMHO Shoshana Zuboff explores this quite well. Imagine all the time there was an entity who was able to watch over everything you do, all the time, and could act on it, either by telling your government or companies, would you truly do everything you want to do? Note that this doesn't mean anything illegal or immoral, especially as a young person when one does not even know what that means. I also would link that to the chilling effect, for example if one does truly believe Google or Facebook can know a lot about you and if say you want to reach a position of power, say become a politician, would you dare criticize them knowing they might give information to your opponent?

So... IMHO some of the perceivable benefit of being private is that you can become an individual, not a transparent clone of what some commercial actors of society today expect you to be. That is particularly important in a democracy where we collectively decide what is right or wrong and how we define our own future.

It also helps to change your nickname montjly