[stalfie]

If I can play devils advocate in favor of public disinterest about these events, I think you can argue that cybersecurity doesn't really matter, in the grand scheme of things. At least data exfiltration.

What would the consequences for humanity be if every single electronic patient record was leaked onto the internet? Immediately hugely bad for some groups, unfortunately. After a good deal of embarrassment and drama however, some severe, perhaps the net effect is positive. It would most likely facilitate a lot of scientific inquiry. A lot of people, especially in medical deserts, also use Chatgpt as an md. Providing AI companies with high quality medical data is actually a public service.

So it goes for many things in life, and except for financial and destructive wipe attacks, data security is mostly about protecting the IP of incumbents, which is somewhere between irrelevant and a net negative. It's hard to say what the long term consequences of the IP system breaking down would be, but there is a good argument to be made that it's not necessarily bad.

As for individual people, most don't really care or are resigned to the fact that Google already knows everything about them, and probably abstractly enjoy the fact that a major company gets brought down to their reality. Plenty of societies have extremely collectivistic mindsets of public info being shared, like Scandinavian countries having public tax filings, and they work just fine.

I think most people would secretly relish the outcomes of everything leaking everywhere. Just like people relish the Epstein files being released, and probably would have loved an unredacted version being leaked. Secrets are something human beings naturally gravitate towards to dig up and sharing, and this is actually for good, sensible reasons. Evolution has simply favored groups that did not hoard knowledge, at least not internally. There is a reason the scientific method has openness as a virtue, and is arguably one of the pillars that has carried humanity out of the dark ages.

[bradishungry]

It would be terrible, I don’t think you’re thinking about what kinds of discrimination can happen due to things like medical records. You can have laws in place to prevent it but if someone can freely see your entire medical history then people WILL take advantage of that. Not to mention how things like citizens traveling to states where abortion is legal, or if a parent disagrees with an operation could affect someone if things are public. This is only talking about medical records, too, the implications of other kinds of espionage have significant repercussions as well. Cybersecurity absolutely does matter

[stalfie]

Actually you're right, upon reflection the medical records example is a terrible one, given the proclivities of many governments and/or vindictive mobs. Although the greater issue here is that there exists governments that care about abortions, and the fact people accept living under their reign one way or another. Unfortunately those government are often in positions of power to figure this out and punish individuals no matter what.

And I'd just like to underline the fact that this is truly a devil's advocate position, not something I'd argue strongly for.

But for the LLM training data company, does that leak matter? I guess that depends on your stance about AI proliferation and safety. But if you don't it's at worst a boost for open source LLMs. Rockstar? A great deal of hard work has surely gone into GTA-6 between all the union busting but, but it hardly matters for humanity what particular game people use to entertain themselves. And the medical device company, although the wipe part is truly just senseless destruction, actually might benefit humanity more if a few bootleg factories of their products appear.

Many of these are very stretched scenarios. But for instance in the case of espionage, the problem is not the fact that people are spying, the problem is that there is a war. And the more nefarious regimes tend to depend more on secrecy and lies in order to perpetuate themselves. If total transparency was applied to all governments equally, most democracies would be positively affected. The problem is not the leakage of the Epstein files. It's that this kind of activity could occur in secret and remained covered up.

[redanddead]

This is the most pragmatic answer. It was valued fairly. Those who stand to lose got spooked. For consumers we're looking at less privacy/new dangers in a globally connected world. We'll need to adapt, these corporations are trying to adapt to new risks. The labs will be held liable for corporate and sovereign losses when the damage is big enough, like meta/facebook recently

[BoppreH]

It's very different for Google, the giant faceless corporation, to know someone's search history. Making it _public_ is a different ballgame.

I can't believe I have to say this, but you can't simply delete an important facet of society (expectation of privacy) and expect things to turn out alright. People will still have hangups around prudish topics and traditions. And privacy has always worked as an escape hatch for people in bad situations, either locally (controlling parents and partners) or society-wide (facist governments, genocides).

Just because we can imagine a society where this information is public and everything still works, doesn't mean that there's a path from here to there.