If you're starting on becoming privacy now, I don't know what to tell you, other than it's probably far too late to try to squeeze the genie back in the lantern. I guess you could cut it off. But if you're relying on memberships to companies, or benefits from the state, or any of these other social organizations to interact with the world, I think you probably have no choice but to be a cog in their machine.
Personally, I think enough of us saw all the dystopian sci-fi as kids that when the internet arrived, it seemed pretty normal to think the idea of putting any of your own info online was completely reckless and just asking for trouble. So when ultimately I did find that my bank and the state had put the info they had on me online, I did what I had been doing to avoid junk mail, and obfuscated it by changing everything anyone had on me to incorrect info. I don't join organizations or sign up for crap, and I'll never own another cellphone, so all I need are some old lady sunglasses and a manifesto to complete the picture. So far only once, when returning to college, the tangled jumble of misinformation I'd created over the last 30 years caused some issues, but I was able to sort that out in person, and then once I was accepted, I immediately change it all to nonsense again. Any algorithm or human looking at the long record of contradictory information on me should have no way of knowing which few items are real in the birds nest of incorrect info. I went to sign up for paypal at one point, and was somewhat pleased when an investigator called me citing the patriot act, trying to parse though all this data and figure out who I was, how old I was, what country I'm from, all of it, and decided to ignore them. My personal computers stay offline, and my company operates on an intranet that has no connection to the internet. I might be about as non-participatory as you can get and still use a computer at all, and it probably sounds like a herculean effort over decades, but it's not, it's less effort and stress to just not use participate in services you don't like, and if that means living in the real world instead, then spend your time in an old wooden canoe on a pretty lake and enjoy the way the gentle breeze swirls the ripples around on the water and the leaves on the willows, and realize if you'd spent the rest of your life staring at a computer you'd never see anything as beautiful as that scene, and there's a new one every second.
Frankly, I think I'm just burned out on pretty much everything in the entire last 30 years of life in this culture. You may not be. Maybe there's a tipping point we cross, or maybe it's a journey down a long path we're all making our way down. I dunno.
