Privacy matters, always matters, and there are abundant warnings about risk of privacy leaks or loss. When your privacy was lost, you will lose it forever and will never be able to hide your privacy entirely again. You can surely improve your practice, become more careful with privacy-releated issues but there are many online and offline resources that can archive your past privacy leak.

Privacy loss possibly results in more risk of physical attacks such as kidnapp like your reported case.
https://github.com/jlopp/physical-bitcoin-attacks