Privacy loss is like climate change. People don’t care because the really bad things haven’t happened yet. People who keep telling them about the bad stuff that is likely to happen are alarmists, and like with climate change there’s an industry with a vested interest in downplaying the issue.
A sneak peek may be coming with what some states are doing to police travel for abortion. Does the algorithm think you might be pregnant? Congratulations, you may now be stopped on state lines and charged with a crime because you are driving someone one state over. Even if you have no intent of getting an abortion you may have to prove that in court if a prosecutor is feeling particularly self righteous today.
People in the US are not accustomed to totalitarian politics. We have rights. But loss of those rights are one populist demagogue away.
When that happens all that surveillance and remote control will suddenly become as relevant as Antarctica’s Thwaites glacier would become if it fell in the ocean.
(Left wing populist demagoguery and authoritarianism are possible too. I’m just picking on the right wing sort because it’s the kind that has traction most recently. But that too can change.)
I'm turning to the opinion that if we really want to fix this, we need to have government mandates that "takeout" style exports are provided by every company/service, in a standard machine-readable format.
If you collect and store any personal data about a user, there needs to be a standard way for them to request a usable copy.
Then allow third parties to build tools that work with those to educate users, which is why standard and usable format are key criteria. E.g. "visualize what X knows about you"
It's the details that would motivate people, but the details are precisely what's invisible right now.
(Disclaimer: talking from a US-centric viewpoint, for the majority of states that don't have digital privacy rights)
A sneak peek may be coming with what some states are doing to police travel for abortion. Does the algorithm think you might be pregnant? Congratulations, you may now be stopped on state lines and charged with a crime because you are driving someone one state over. Even if you have no intent of getting an abortion you may have to prove that in court if a prosecutor is feeling particularly self righteous today.
People in the US are not accustomed to totalitarian politics. We have rights. But loss of those rights are one populist demagogue away.
When that happens all that surveillance and remote control will suddenly become as relevant as Antarctica’s Thwaites glacier would become if it fell in the ocean.
(Left wing populist demagoguery and authoritarianism are possible too. I’m just picking on the right wing sort because it’s the kind that has traction most recently. But that too can change.)