[BoxFour]

I feel you're correct, and it's why it's a losing battle. It's a spectrum of consequences. The worst outcomes are serious but rare. For most people the most severe outcome they'll deal with are unauthorized credit card charges, which are an annoyance at worst.

The most severe consequences just aren't common enough to elicit any kind of change, and even when they are the response is about cleaning up the damage instead of fixing the upstream problem (how that fraud was allowed to occur in the first place).

[kalaksi]

Personally, I haven't had any serious leaks that I know of so I've mostly suffered from increased spam and scam attempts (I know they were a result of a leak).

One time there was a leak from a university database and as a result there were a few news articles over the years about people that had their identity stolen likely due to that leak. It's not just credit card charges. They have had loans taken in their names, stuff bought on store credit or something (nowadays that's not so easy), stuff stolen from library in their name...

They had to deal with the fallout for years, always fearing that there's a new letter waiting at home regarding some unpaid expense or from debt enforcement agency that they have to contact and try to make it go away. It shouldn't be too hard if you have an open case with the police but it's not always that easy.

Also, if the leaked data is sensitive (e.g. private conversations, records about mental health etc.), you can face extortion or the data may get published.

One other thing that I know of personally is that victims of harassment very much don't like to have their contact info leaked to the harasser.

[cfiggers]

If we conceive of civilization as being like a biological system, then perhaps there are certain maladies that just are not worth dedicating resources to. Cells die all the time, of a trillion different causes. Few are worth rewriting an immune system for.

If the most severe consequences of this pattern are sufficiently uncommon—uncommon enough that even by your own admission the system as a whole fails to notice them, much less feel any pain over it—then maybe it's a waste of the organism's resources to attempt a systemic resolution. Maybe the "losing battle" as you call it is not with individual organizations or even with broader data security culture per se. It might not even be with the legal system to finally inflict some, any consequence on anyone for letting this repeatedly happen. Perhaps the battle we're losing is, at some deeper level, with the very physics of civilizational energy distribution and consumption, aka, with societal entropy. In which case... Yeah, that battle seems pretty heckin' losing to me. Good thing identity theft only seems to happen to "other people."

I know this argument is going to ring pretty hollow and the irony will bite me pretty hard if I get my SSN highjacked literally tomorrow. Which, thanks to Equifax in 2017, could theoretically happen any minute now! Just like it could've happened any minute now for the last 9 years!

But then again, even if and just because I suddenly personally care a lot more about this issue because I'm suddenly affected by it, that doesn't obligate you or anyone else to feel the same way.

A certain kind of indifference toward the suffering of others might be civilizationally efficient. In which case it might be absurd and maybe even ethically problematic to care in aggregate any more than we happen to do.

Literally, who's to say?

[cfiggers]

(Just for anyone who struggles with reading comprehension: I'm being incredibly sarcastic here. I think it sucks enormously that we broadly ignore the plight of the few just because most people skate by fine. My top level post is also intended satirically. I do care about this stuff and hate that on balance big companies do not. I'm shouting my protest into the void in the form of irony-laced nihilism, aka, the song of my people, aka, burned-out and disenfranchised millenials tired of hoping for the better world we came up believing would some day exist.)