Perhaps computers have changed the landscape so radically that our minds are not adequately prepared for the task. Much of our evolution as a species probably adapted us for circumstances that do not quite match our very unnatural modern settings. Consider why so many of us are unnecessarily harmed over and over again every day because automobiles demand that we adapt to speeds that we are not naturally prepared to handle. Consider why we find the general theory of relativity and much of quantum physics to be against our intuitive understanding of the world around us. Consider how very unnatural is much of technology.
It is to be expected that computer security and privacy problems are similarly confounding problems. How many of us are aware that electronic book readers watch what you read? Do we know who is watching us on web sites? How many of us have thought about how people with smartphones might accidentally tell others about where we are? Did you know that your smartphone sensors could give you away? People are so surprised by these findings and more that there have been congressional hearings about what computing giants can see about us. I could inundate you with seemingly endless examples, but I think you understand my point: it is a terrible cognitive burden to place on others when we expect them to understand every single thing that could go wrong in computing.
As David Brin and others have observed, we have always been able to watch what other people around us are doing. If we had expended the effort to connect the dots, then many hitherto obscure signals would be revealed. So what is different today? Perhaps the biggest differences are due to two new pieces of technology: computers and networks.
Memory is crucial to any computing machine. In fact, you get computers with different powers depending on, for example, how much memory the computer has, or how it accesses that memory. The most powerful computer that is known to be physically realizable requires infinite memory. Now, no single man-made computer has infinite memory, but one way to approximate that is to share memory over a network.
There are then two properties that emerge from this interaction. One is that we have written software that are very good at persisting data in durable memory, so much so that the European Union is trying to counteract this with the Right to be Forgotten. (As intellectuals love to point out, Thamus has warned Theuth about the effects of writing on memory and wisdom.) The other is that networks help to link otherwise disparate pieces of data, the result of which, as we know from endless research, is all sorts of privacy conundrums.
The other thing computers are very good at is making some (but not all) problems tractable or scalable. As Mitch Ratcliffe is supposed to have said, “A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history…with the possible exception of handguns and tequila.” Not only do security or privacy attacks happen much faster with computers, the profits and losses induced by networked computers are also more extreme. Additionally, networked computers permit cowards to be attackers: this asymmetry means not only that you may not know what they know about you, but also who knows these things about you.
Furthermore, privacy is a problem of the abstract versus the visceral: you do not literally see that information about you is seeping away from the machines around you.
Finally, one must also consider the feudal model of security and privacy on the Internet when thinking about this problem.
Why do you think we are losing privacy on the Internet?
Privacy@Poly 