Practically every month now in the USA, I hear about some CRAZY privacy violation or “security threat”, or some other doomer bad news from some public official that we are supposed to care about.
Examples:
- Kaspersky is Russian owned, so we can’t trust that Antivirus anymore
- TPLink Chinese owned, can’t trust that brand of routers anymore
- All social security numbers in the USA stolen/hacked
- Privacy breaches very often. It would be easier to list which companies DIDN’T have a privacy violation yet. LastPass was the point where I was truly surprised
- Temu overriding device security and gaining access to parts of your mobile device it shouldn’t have access to, and sending huge amounts of data to unknown sources
- Meta and Facebook Cambridge analytica
We hear repeatedly about these from Government, top world leaders… and nothing is done. Why do we pretend to care? Like really, why do we bother caring? What is the incentive for me to care?
You know how they say there is a difference between what people need and what they want? This is one of those cases. We gave up privacy in exchange for convenience. E.g. Cloud storage is convenient. For files, for documents, for code. It’s so convenient that apart from acting in outrage when we discover that companies are scanning our data to train AIs, among other things, we are willing to do absolute nothing. And I think that’s because we fear to lose that convenience if we force a change (not that we could even if we wanted). In other words, we are getting what we pay for (which makes sense because often all those cloud services are “free”).
There is also another problem: some personal data is irrelevant to us, but it makes companies money when the data is all aggregate together. So, it’s easy to let it pass (apart from some outrage) when you are informed that there is a leak and everyone can know how many hours you spend using a service. We don’t feel it’s very relevant. But having this kind of data about everyone can help companies to tailor their service to tske advantage of our habits, bringing THEM a lot of money. Most data they have is irrelevant for you but very relevant for companies that try to sell services.
Ideally I’d like to get paid. I’ll allow you to track me, but I get 1$ every time records on the database with my data are returned by a query. See if they like it…