[bradford]

I'm of the opinion that 'surveillance capitalism', as described in this article, is a problem of policy/legality, not technology.

Technology minded individuals keep looking for a technical solution to this problem. I'm hesitant that a technical solution exists.

Unfortunately, I also don't expect Congress to promptly pass new legislation that competently addresses the problem. (I am more optimistic about the efforts by the EU and individual US states.)

[closeparen]

Probably the most material privacy issue for most people is that very basic operations like establishing your identity, providing a contact method, and making a payment all involve giving your counterparty a long-lived identifier which they must keep secret and which anyone they leak it to (intentionally or not) can harm you by abusing. These identifiers are necessarily given out to hundreds of unsophisticated and often trashy operations like supermarkets, car dealers, e-commerce retailers, and soon (sadly) app developers. Unlike the FAANGs of the world, these people have never heard of cryptography and don’t blink twice about selling Excel spreadsheets for a few extra pennies. But the need to share secrets with them is a technological problem — public key cryptography could serve these used cases without giving the counterparty something to leak.

[bradford]

I may have interpreted the problems addressed in the article differently.

Certainly, privacy incidents can occur due to mishandling of sensitive information (i.e., secrets, identifiers). Addressing these are a no-brainer and something that technology can and should address.

I interpret the article as addressing a second kind of privacy issue that isn't due to mishandling. Instead, it's part of the profit model for many major tech companies: advertising. In this case, the privacy issue isn't a mishandling, it's by design and explicitly disclosed in the Terms of Service.

(I can't say which one is a bigger issue at large, but I believe policy is needed to address the second issue).