Privacy advocates tend to spend a lot of time refuting the high profile discussions about the pending death of privacy, particularly online. This focus would be better spent addressing the cause: security. Identifiable information about us pops up in places you wouldn’t expect, leaving a detailed virtual trail. Security mechanisms force the recording, monitoring and auditing of that information in the interest of protecting us from some unseen enemy. Resulting breaches, be it by good guys or bad guy, are covered by the media with some combination of shock and awe. Is it possible to build a better mousetrap? It will probably be expensive, definitely time consuming, and starts with rethinking how the systems we’ve created to serve us have become the masters.
