Do people really care about personal data?
Privacy is difficult to understand as long as it’s presented as an abstract concept. But to those teenagers, the desire to talk to their friends without their parents or teachers knowing everything that’s said is not at all abstract. Similarly, all consumers care very much about the practical effects of today’s centralised data warehouses, such as wasting time dealing with bureaucracy that makes it hard to change the phone number on an account. They care about bad credit histories, misdirected post, and the failure to get what they want. They care when they discover that the photograph they thought they deleted was only hidden from view but has remained in the site’s database, where it has been automatically recognised, reused, and added to profiles that have been sold to advertisers or become the subject of a government applied court order. They care about being erroneously placed on no-fly lists because an online “friend” once watched a terrorist video and feeling that their personal relationships are a commodity.
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