Totally agree, although most people today will trade freedom (and safety/privacy) for convenience. Look no further than the personal computer. People willingly allow companies to track them because they are too lazy to learn an alternative software. And the internet, well, that's the ultimate exploitation. Give Google your soul, Google acts as an "Internet Passport" that saves you creating an account with everyone. Just use your Google account and keep feeding them analytics info. Most people don't fully appreciate the severity of the situation, even when they know what they are doing because their risk assessment skills are near-zero or they are philosophically "pragmatists" (they hide behind a thin explanation of "my conscious choice" because they've given up, lost the battle, or been/become too lazy, etc., and they do this to resolve their own cognitive dissonance).
My hypotheses on why the youth don't care is, well, it's either just sign of times of brilliant social engineering, or a combo. See they grew up mostly or completely in a social media era. Their culture is an online one. Not like ours. Our online culture was IRC, forums, and, for some of the older folk here, mailing lists. Our culture was connected and all, but it wasn't in our pockets. Moreover, we used the web back when anonymity was a norm. But as more and more "everyday folk" began using it, so the world grew smaller and the edges of the map got coloured in. Them kids grew up in a world sans much anonymity and cozza that and cozza each big info leak or massive scandal having no perceptable long-term effects, well, it went from "that's bad" to plain ol' uneventful. Basically, they got the ultimate vaccines: anesthetisation. Now running parallel to this all is how tech went from compartmentalized to integrated in our lives. For most of us over 30, the WWW is still a compartment of our lives; there's that and the real world with jobs, responsibilities, asshat bosses, and dreams of becoming a author (projecting much?). For the younger gen, the WWW is part of (integrated) into reality. That's why everyone gets "triggered" and why "cancel culture" exists (I'm not gonna discuss these because it could get political, just examples to illustrate how seriously they take the world online). And that's the problem. The problem is we were the ones who armed them with the tech, i.e. smartphones, to actually enable them. And pow! Now we got a generation who like to advertise their private lives (yes, dichotomy noted) online. And that's it. We helped Big Tech carve this generation of easily influeced youths who can't think for themselves and need a group to belong to just to make them feel like they have an identity.
People criticize my plans to homeschool my kids. Well, while theirs are mainlining social media through the needle of their smartphones while mine are building/writing/drawing stuff, playing music, questioning the world, and/or just enjoying nature (what'll be left of it T_T that is), then they can come back to me.