This statement in an OpEd in the Des Moines Register by Anthony Gaughan, associate professor of law at Drake University, gave me pause:
The greatest threat to your privacy is not posed by the NSA. It’s posed by hackers, thieves and corporations.
So what do you think is the single greatest threat to privacy?
I agree with Professor Gaughan that “hackers, thieves, and corporations” are bigger privacy threats than the government. I just think he has the order wrong. Hackers and thieves (and the NSA) target the businesses because the businesses already gather and hoard our private information.
The obsolete notion of “reasonable expectation of privacy” has made current reductions in privacy self reinforcing. Any business plan which reduces privacy gets funded and put into effect before the privacy implications are considered. Folks who object in advance are accused of stifling innovation. Afterward, of course nobody has a reasonable expectation of privacy in that area any more because everybody knows that company x gathers that data.
Also the extremely harmful but easily disprovable belief that opt-out and “notice and choice” protect privacy means that corporations feel free to act on the belief that it’s easier to ask for forgiveness for their intrusions than to get real permission. Thus we end up with flashlight phone apps that track location data without the user being really aware of it.
Business are given far too much leeway to invade privacy and they are taking full advantage of it.