Privacy advocacy has not gained traction as a mainstream issue because its proponents continue to cite potential government overreach as the primary risk factor in a world of diminishing privacy. As a result, even though many people are convinced of the moral arguments against dragnet surveillance, they disregard it as an issue, because "government overreach" seems like a small risk factor. In other words, people hear "big brother is watching you" and think "sure, but he's not going to do anything to me."

Nobody actually thinks the US government will suddenly implement martial law, extrajudicial detention, or unsanctioned executions. Nobody actually thinks the US is on the verge of collapsing into totalitarianism. So why would anyone actually care about the privacy debate?

The privacy debate promulgates fear of government overreach, and as a result tends to attract isolated clusters of libertarian idealogues rather than a grassroots distribution of everyday citizens.

To achieve mainstream viability, the privacy debate needs to shift direction to focus on more realistic risks of constant monitoring of metadata on the habits of citizens.

Do you know who's far more interested in your metadata than the government?: Private organizations that derive profit from actuarial models where you are a datapoint and a confidence interval. Who's going to have a better actuarial model: a century-old health insurance company that has access to your most basic metadata, or a modern insurance company with access to realtime intelligence on your consumption and fitness habits?

Insurance companies stand to benefit the most from collecting metadata paired with unique identifiers. The more accurate models an insurance company can develop, the more profit it can make as it hedges against its risk with greater certainty.

Of course, this isn't necessarily bad for the consumer. Imagine a healthy 22 year old who wears a Fitbit, connects with his college educated social network on Facebook, and pays only with Google wallet. As a 22 year old, he should be in one of the lowest risk categories for health insurance. But the health insurance company, without access to metadata, does not know for sure how healthy his habits are. But if he's healthy anyway, why shouldn't he opt into sharing his metadata with the insurance company? If he needs to surrender a little privacy to prove he's a healthy 22 year old, but he saves 15% on his insurance because of it, isn't that a worthwhile tradeoff?

Recent attempts at insurance startups are already doing this. In NYC for example, Oscar discounts your health insurance if you share your fitness tracker data with them. Who wouldn't take that deal?

But if you opt in once, what happens as you age? Will your insurance company increase your rates if you refuse to continue sharing metadata? Will such refusal, a desire to hide metadata previously shared freely, act as evidence in itself of poor health?

There are many questions to be asked and answered around the privacy debate, including what exactly is the privacy debate? What is its cause? What will get people to rally behind that cause?

Clearly, it's not fear of the government. So maybe it's time to try inducing fear of higher bills.