[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.)