This is a totally false and a distraction. We don't need a trusted execution environment. We just need rights enshrined in law.
From a certain POV, this is correct, and I don't disagree with the general aim.
Rights do not have to be guaranteed by bulletproof technology in order to be valuable.
Entirely correct. What's of more concern is that we not only have a general public, but an "expert" population of programmers and other technical workers that doesn't make decisions about these things in an informed rational way. This is why I get on the soapbox in support of trusted execution environments and point out how they can be used against the authorities.
the threat of a lawsuit can be a powerful disincentive.
But I would argue that the "trusting trust" problem encompasses not only privacy and security, but political power as well. When transparency itself is strictly voluntary and comes into competition with the temptation of money and great power, we've seen that such a deterrent loses some of its potency. The threat of a lawsuit also doesn't work as well against certain governments in certain contexts.
You may well be right that technology is a distraction, for now. The social and legal framework might be the thing to establish first.
Sure - some kind of trusted execution environment (which I would argue we don't understand well yet) would be an ideal solution.
But... a trusted execution environment would be no use if it wasn't mandated, so it is secondary to having rights enshrined in law.
And yes, there is a trust problem. But I think it would be very difficult to operate a massive data collection empire on the scale of Google or Facebook without at least one whistleblower exposing it.
From a certain POV, this is correct, and I don't disagree with the general aim.
Rights do not have to be guaranteed by bulletproof technology in order to be valuable.
Entirely correct. What's of more concern is that we not only have a general public, but an "expert" population of programmers and other technical workers that doesn't make decisions about these things in an informed rational way. This is why I get on the soapbox in support of trusted execution environments and point out how they can be used against the authorities.
the threat of a lawsuit can be a powerful disincentive.
But I would argue that the "trusting trust" problem encompasses not only privacy and security, but political power as well. When transparency itself is strictly voluntary and comes into competition with the temptation of money and great power, we've seen that such a deterrent loses some of its potency. The threat of a lawsuit also doesn't work as well against certain governments in certain contexts.
You may well be right that technology is a distraction, for now. The social and legal framework might be the thing to establish first.