Think of it this way: what is more important to you, the convenience of exchanging text messages with your friends, or keeping these conversations private?
This wasn't always a choice. Before electronic communication people exchanged letters sometimes very frequently (mail service in London peaked at 12x/day). The privacy of these letters was however protected by law, with a warrant being required for police to open and read them.
I don't quite see why our packets and devices shouldn't have the same protections.
Are you saying that these things must be mutually exclusive? It is entirely possible to have completely private and convenient conversations between two parties.
No, I'm not. It is a thought experiment to determine for yourself the value of privacy in a more tangible way. Like, if you were made to choose between one or the other, which one would you take?
That's different from arguing that they are mutually exclusive which I am not.
The point is to give an example for my original tenet, that privacy often is valued as a theoretical concept but that people are apparently willing to give it up rather quickly for something else in return. Or, from a different point of view, how much convenience are you willing to give up for your privacy?
For example, I used to be on the extreme "pro privacy" end of the spectrum. But it is clear that philosophically speaking, privacy for everyone is not a completely positive ideal in all contexts. And that naturally raises the question about what other values privacy competes with, and how they should be balanced.
Intuitively, "convenience" should perhaps be considered less important than "privacy", but interestingly that's not what we observe actually happening in the real world.
