The U.K. Parliament is close to passing the Online Safety Bill, which threatens global privacy by allowing backdoors into messaging services, compromising end-to-end encryption. Despite objections, no amendments were accepted. The bill also includes content filtering and surveillance measures. There’s still a chance for lawmakers to protect privacy with an amendment preserving encryption. A recent survey shows the majority of U.K. citizens want strong privacy on messaging apps.
Of course, otherwise we wouldn’t still be using it.
But in the context of internet privacy, specifically, my guess is it was initially popularized by tech-libertarians or those who hung around on the conspiracy theory areas of the internet (Venn diagram overlaps a bit there, though not entirely).
There’s no doubt it was used as a quote for privacy in general before that.
I should hold back on my assumptions, though, so thanks for reminding me of that. Could obviously be very wrong.