Reading the title, I assumed that the article would talk about what people mean by privacy. However, it really is about how people try to achieve privacy (by reducing the mount of collected data, or by reducing the amount of collectible data). The thing is how you do it depends on what you are trying to achieve. When discussing privacy, I find it useful to distinguish three types: a) privacy from government, which is fondamentally not a technical problem but a political one, b) privacy from big corporations, and c) privacy from criminals (i.e. "hackers"). In my experience, people are really mostly interested in c) and so-called privacy conscious people are mostly interested in b). As for how to achieve b), I (perhaps naively) assume that corporate data collection obeys a law of diminishing returns, so the best strategy is simply to do more than the masses who do not care.