Lil devils x said:
Like I said though creepy people tend to creep. Their personal motive is often they are just creepy to begin with. What is really preventing someone else from downloading the data from the servers that store the data though? If they do not have people actively keeping their servers secure, more often than not they are not going to be secure, but that is an expense not many people want to have to incur. I remember a while back that people being able to do that is why that group of lawyers were suing facebook because they were successfully able to breach their servers.
It will depend. Some companies will be proactive and have strict data-handling standards in place that will act against malefic actors abusing their position. For their own protection, if nothing else; a company that has a stalker in its employ that is using gathered data to spy on targets will be liable for suing when that stalker is caught. Many, however, will not. It is a historical trend that companies in general will not accept safety, liability, and consumer protection as necessary costs without government enforcement.
Ultimately, however, even extreme regulation and the highest personal standards ultimately only discourage bad actors; there is no true complete protection for non-physical, omni-accessible objects such as data, at least at this time. So far as personal fears go, that is just something that has to be accepted on some level. One can only expect to minimize their danger, not eliminate it, and expectations set accordingly. Minimizing danger, of course, includes petitioning the government to get off its ass and act for the peoples' protection.
Saelune said:
The technology is inevitable. What would assuage my fears is if we had a reliable government and law system that instead of dragging its feel on progression and otherwise preferred to support the greedy and evil who will abuse this technology and data, so that it could adequately and quickly enough create and enforce laws for the benefit of the common people to protect us from those who would abuse us with this technology.
Like, there are no laws at all governing the fair use of the DNA gathered by things like 23 And Me, and that's a problem. Instead of waiting for it to be a problem, we should prevent the problem. Too many laws wait for something to go bad before it is fixed, and even then it usually does not.
One of the weaknesses of democracy is that it favors being reactionary. It depends on human nature in aggregate, rather than a stronger, smaller identity. And what is human nature, in general, is to act on problems that an individual personally recognizes, and to prioritize physical problems over abstract problems.
So, in a democracy, firstly, a majority of people have to recognize a problem in order for the problem to be acted on. Then second, a particular problem must be prioritized highly to be acted upon before others. Data privacy has issues on both fronts; although most people recognize that they'd rather not have a bunch of strangers snooping over their lives unnoticed, that's just the thing: the vast majority of it is unnoticed. Therefore, it doesn't register as a problem that needs to be acted on. Sure, plenty of people have had problems: stolen identities, harassment online. But most people just have a notification in their email to change their password every once in a while when somebody manages to hack a website. That's not enough to motivate people to adopt the problem as a political cause. The second issue is that even for those who recognize it as a problem, data privacy is abstract. Hunger, shelter, clean water, the state of infrastructure, healthcare, even money and violence, have physical, immediate dimensions to them. It is survival instinct to have an hierarchy of needs, and physical problems understandably take priority.
This is largely why most governments do not tend to be proactive. Baffle there mentioned Germany, but there's really no country in the world trying to create, say, an OSHA for data privacy, which is what is needed. I have my doubts that such measures will be passed any time soon; the first world is undergoing the greatest period of political instability since the last great wars, and such periods generally aren't when you see massive overhauls of industrial regulation, no matter how much they are needed. Won't ever happen until folks get enough other folks to recognize the problem and the desire to act on it, so complaints and spreading awareness aren't futile endeavors. Just something that needs to be recognized as being in for the long haul.
