I wrote recently about how we are at a time during which lots of little decisions will determine whether we find ourselves in an information utopia or dystopia. There is a lot of legislation in the works both here in the US and abroad that speaks directly to this. In particular, there is a schizophrenic approach to privacy. We are simultaneously getting efforts to provide more privacy in commercial settings and less privacy vis-a-vis the government. In the US, the FTC is working on new privacy regulations at the same time that the Cybersecurity bill drafts have provisions that could amount to enormous backdoors into consumer data. The UK is doing much the same with an even more aggressive government access bill. I am beginning to think of the commercial legislation as “privacy theater” (akin to security theater) which in no small part distracts from the simultaneous attack on privacy from the government.
