Big Brother?
It seems the next wave eroding western privacy has hit us, confirming what Google’s Eric Schmidt said - there is no privacy anymore. April has seen a wide range of seemingly unrelated attacks on the thin shred of privacy we had left.
The month barely started before Epsilon, the world’s largest email marketing company accidentally gave away email addresses for all and sundry so your spam could be personalized from here on in. Researchers found Apple and Android have been collecting GPS and cell tower data on your phone and uploading to themselves for some time now and from it can reconstruct everywhere you’ve been lately. Not to be beaten, TomTom confessed they had given GPS data showing how fast you were traveling to Dutch police, who used it to place speed camera’s where average speed was higher than the posted limit. If we needed any doubt as to the direction of the privacy tide, Sony leaked 77 million account details including logons, credit cards and card security codes.
It is my contention privacy is one of the foundational stones of freedom, so none of this is great news. By implication the likely long term outcome is your children will live lives with less freedom, more regulation and closer scrutiny than you.
What is of immediate concern is the likelihood any of these vendor will suffer meaningful repercussions are (drumroll plse) — zero. Sadly none of these are new or landmark events. We have become used ever larger and more spectacular data losses. So blase it prompted Bruce Schneier to make this note on his blog about the vast amount of press the Epsilon stuff up received:
“Yes, millions of names and e-mail addresses might have been stolen. Yes, other customer information might have been stolen, too. Yes, this personal information could be used to create more personalized and better targeted phishing attacks.
So what? These sorts of breaches happen all the time, and even more personal information is stolen.”
That’s not a poke at Mr Schneier because he’s dead right. This disconnect between cause and effect is a serious and persistent structural problem that works to ensure nothing will change in the coming months and millions more credit cards and personal details will be stolen and used for fraudulent activities of various kinds. Makes for wonderful news stories but isn’t good for you or me. In this latest round there won’t be any fines to speak of and no one will go to jail. The consequences of negligence, incompetence or willful abuse will continue to fall on the victim; especially if you happen to have your credit card or personal details used for fraud in the near future.
I fearlessly predict the on going response from those responsible will be “We apologize for any inconvenience”, perhaps with a smattering of patronizing drivel to the effect we should be smarter about which emails we open and check web sites before trusting them with our credit card.
What needs to happen is a direct connection between the cause and effect. Until then our privacy will be highly spoken of in public and highly disregarded outside press releases.
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