"Normal" technological progress currently weighs heavily against personal privacy. Aggregation beats segregation; accumulation wins over deletion; sharing trumps privacy.
It could be that that will turn out to be entirely unimportant, and that old farts from the "pre-Millennial" generation will be the last people who think digital privacy is worth a pig's burp. On the other hand, it could just be that we don't yet understand the problem. When I was a kid, smoking a cigarette was a sign of cosmopolitan adulthood. One brand used to advertise by showing a pack of twenty gripped in the reassuringly manly hand of an airline pilot - the classic benevolent authority figure. Wouldn't it be ironic, incidentally, if that turned out to have subliminally spurred a young
Chesley Sullenberger III towards his future career?
Evolution disposes the human being to respond to present danger and short-term risk; we are much worse at acting on the basis of risk which is remote from us in time and place.
Socially, there's a pretty direct correlation between the speed with which any given elective behaviour can kill us, and the extent to which we have tried to fix the problem. Consider this list (in increasing order of delay between the 'at risk' behaviour and the fatal consequences):
- Hard drugs
- Alcohol
- Tobacco
- Food
It can take years of bad eating habits to get to the point where the individual can no longer contemplate the sustained effort of will it would require to undo the damage sustained. No single doughnut or deep-fried pizza can be blamed, and yet each cumulatively contributed its share of calories, cholesterol and erosion of healthy behaviour.
A health and safety expert once said to me: "the incident which finally wrecks someone's back forever is very seldom the worst thing they have ever done to it, the heaviest thing they have ever tried to lift, or whatever. You have to see all these things as cumulative. Eventually you get to the point where just bending the wrong way to pick up a piece of paper is enough to trigger the payback for all those previous abuses you inflicted on your back".
Part of me still suspects that that's how privacy works. We may never see a direct link between an individual, inappropriate disclosure or abuse of confidence and yet, bit by bit, they may all be contributing to the loss of our privacy, our exposure to a steadily-growing risk of irreversible damage, and a more general erosion of privacy-respecting behaviour.
