Literally everything you do carries a non-zero risk of death, being 100% safe is impossible. Given that every day is a gamble, knowing your risk and reward ratios is important for deciding which activities to do and which to stay away from.
In this specific case, if dedicating your whole life to privacy reduces your odds of identity theft from 2% to 1%, I think a lot of people would say "I'll spend my life having fun and accept the higher risk"; if a tiny lifestyle change could reduce the odds from 20% to 1%, the outcome would probably be different.
If everyone shits in the streets, the question isn't whether you should dedicate your life to avoiding all the shit to reduce your risk of infection, the question is whether society should stop shitting in the streets, because that's actually not much effort, while massively improving the health of everyone.
"In this specific case, if society making privacy a top priority at the expense of everything else reduces everybody's odds of identity theft from 2% to 1%, I think a lot of people would say "I'd rather society priorotised having fun and accept the higher risk to society"; if a tiny lifestyle change across society could reduce the odds from 20% to 1%, the outcome would probably be different."
The point remains the same: you can't make sensible decisions without knowing the odds; avoiding all activities with non-zero risk means avoiding all activities, and that's why it matters how much.
I'd also say that the risk doesn't begin at zero. E.g., businesses, employers, schools, other orgs, family, partners, friends, colleagues, etc already have a lot of our personal data, and however small the risk is, it's real and worth consideration.
We actually consider these risk/benefit scenarios all the time in everyday life. E.g.,
- We might surrender too much information when presented with the chance to win something in a draw; or give up some non-relevant personal information in a signup form just because the field is mandatory
- Amazon, Apple, etc keep our credit card numbers; Monzo, TransferWise, etc our bank account numbers—but we're happy with that because of the convenience (or because there's no other way to do business with them)
- You might have personal documentation saved on iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox, etc because you want easy access to it; similarly with passwords and services like 1Password
That's the only thing that matters.
