When I hear ceos of for profit companies talking about privacy on their apps and how the government is trying to stop the privacy…
All I really hear is the government is going to ruin my business model…
Discussion
true ! *threatening to leave country X profits*
Unfortunately, anytime I hear someone talk about privacy, I think that ship sailed about two decades ago. You only a handful of operating systems and device makers at this point. I think there's zero chance any of them have truly private anything anymore.
It's a spectrum. I think of it like hygiene -- there are certain simply "wash your hands" type principles that can get people pretty far along the path to decent privacy...
There's security against mass "retail" surveillance, which is probably achievable for most people, and then there's security against *targeted* surveillance against you as an individual, which is a more difficult situation.
Yeah, I like that take. You don't want to leave yourself wide open to low-level attacks, but there's very little you can do to defend against governments or advanced hacker groups.
You protect yourself the best you reasonably can.
Yes, this is sort of the best case scenario -- companies should go out of business if they cave into government demands.
The default desire on the part of consumers, to the extent they understand it, is "keep my stuff private." End-to-end encryption does this. To the extent that big tech companies cave to the government, they make themselves vulnerable to market upstarts (Proton, etc) who explicitly have privacy "by design".