[Bilal_io]

When we talk about privacy, we are not only talking about what you can control. Your bank info is secure until it's not, meaning that without privacy regulations the bank sells your info and habits to anyone who's willing to pay, the same thing goes for your phone company and many other essential services.

Whether we accept it or not, the cloud is our "home" now. We have little to no control on who keeps our information on their servers. (i.e. employer, government, school, bank, phone company...)

And I'll use the home as an analogy here. A bad actor can access your house anyway, why have a door? Why have laws that criminalize burglary? Using your example, you could say not to keep anything valuable at home.

I agree with your point that we shouldn't be surprised if our information is hacked, but the point about privacy isn't to necessarily protect you against hackers, but to regulate those that keep your information. Prohibit them from selling your info, store it when not needed and as an extra benefit make it more difficult for hackers to access your info.

[JAA1337]

Good response. I believe the right counter is "diminishing returns".

Yes, the bad actor can break in my door, but they actually have to do it. Walking through without a door is sooooo much easier.

But then when they get inside, what will they find? Will I have silver and gold bars? Or will it be random HN posts?

My advice is to take reasonable precautions. However, if you have your entire life savings in an offshore back account with Venmo access which doesn't require 2FA ... then yea, I would worry.

I believe things that are valuable, like truly valuable, should be hard to change. Like liquidating a 401k life savings shouldn't be a couple mouse clicks. It should be a long and hard process because you are prolly only going to once or twice in your life. There is nothing wrong IMO with requiring being present at a bank to perform significant value transfers. Sure, wouldn't it be nice to only have to click a button? Sure ... but requiring physical (think MFA) slows the process down for the sake of security.

[Bilal_io]

I agree, and I think your examples of Venmo, and liquidating your 401k are examples of where regulation is needed. Same goes for storing data, while many people hate the GDPR, I think forcing companies to delete personal data is an important piece of legislation. The same thing goes for the right to be forgotten even if it's by manual request.

[JAA1337]

Completely agree on GDPR. Unfortunately there is so much money to be made in selling to people. I hope legislation wins out.