It's funny how perspective matters. I really did know better, but my first reaction was to assume that "security" in the online context means "personal security" and that it is therefore either synonymous with or the product of privacy. I do in fact appreciate that for certain national security and law enforcement applications this is not the case, and yet the instinct remains. It's hard to imagine that the hoover approach to data collection by the industry today, or even by government, has any legitimate justification in terms of the actual security of actual people. Even with terrorism- the amount of chit chat must exceed the actual capacity or likelihood of operations by many orders of magnitude. In an earlier era, when it was far more difficult to collect data from phone calls or mailed, written communication, the threats were not likely that different, and we endured. I appreciate this might seem a willfully naive take, and perhaps it is, but also not. The bulk of real harm that can be done online is online harm. The privacy and security of individuals are largely the same in this context, and involve protecting their real assets, location, and identity from hostile actors, all of which is more harmed by corporate mass data collection than protected by it.
It's funny how perspective matters. I really did know better, but my first reaction was to assume that "security" in the online context means "personal security" and that it is therefore either synonymous with or the product of privacy. I do in fact appreciate that for certain national security and law enforcement applications this is not the case, and yet the instinct remains. It's hard to imagine that the hoover approach to data collection by the industry today, or even by government, has any legitimate justification in terms of the actual security of actual people.
Even with terrorism- the amount of chit chat must exceed the actual capacity or likelihood of operations by many orders of magnitude. In an earlier era, when it was far more difficult to collect data from phone calls or mailed, written communication, the threats were not likely that different, and we endured.
I appreciate this might seem a willfully naive take, and perhaps it is, but also not. The bulk of real harm that can be done online is online harm. The privacy and security of individuals are largely the same in this context, and involve protecting their real assets, location, and identity from hostile actors, all of which is more harmed by corporate mass data collection than protected by it.