Privacy Behaviors Changed Little After Snowden

An anonymous reader writes: An article in Communications of the ACM takes a look at how Edward Snowden's revelations about government surveillance have changed privacy behaviors across the world. The results are fairly disappointing. While the news that intelligence agencies were trawling data from everyday citizens sparked an interest in privacy, it was small, and faded quickly. Even through media coverage has continued for a long time after the initial reports, public interest dropped back to earlier levels long ago. The initial interest spike was notably less than for other major news events. Privacy-enhancing behaviors experienced a small surge, but that too failed to impart any long-term momentum. The author notes that the spike in interest "following the removal of privacy-enhancing functions in Facebook, Android, and Gmail" was stronger than the reaction to the government's privacy-eroding actions.

Comments

Re:Snowden confirmed what we already suspected

[Anonymous Coward]

The state, which was formerly the institution from the people for the people,

This is sarcasm, right? Please tell me no one is really this naive. The US was formed by a bunch of rich white people for their own interests. Hence why most states, even after ratification, maintained for many decades their requirements that one be a landowner to vote which basically denied the vote to poor white people, most freed blacks, and many others. And then even after some states relaxed that requirement for whites, they still imposed it on freed blacks.

is now an institution to protect property and economic interests.

It was always such an institution. What sort of white-washed history were you taught that you would actually believe such silliness?

Re:Corporate media doesn't act in public's interes

[mrchaotica]

There is too much news to cover the slow way exclusively.

No. There's too much irrelevant celebrity bullshit and unimportant fluff to do that, but that kind of "news" is designed to distract, not inform. Only cover the important issues and there's plenty of time.

As to this all being corporate media's fault... can you give me a counter non-corporate media example that is better?

Any comedian (and yes, I realize what that implies about what a fucking sad a state of affairs we're really in). In particular, John Stewart, Steven Colbert and John Oliver are infinitely more informative than any allegedly-"actual" "news." And I mean "infinitely" literally, by the way -- measuring the valuable insight of, say, Fox News is like dividing by zero.

For example, John Oliver devoted an entire half-hour to government surveillance, including an interview with Edward Snowden where he (humorously) distilled these privacy issues into terms the general public would understand. I'm fucking appalled to have to say this, but that is many orders of magnitude better journalism than I've seen from any of those pathetically worthless toadies who actually call themselves "journalists" in decades.

And that's not even all! If you look at Youtube's autoplay list for John Oliver's videos, it appears that just about every goddamn episode covers an actually-important issue (civil forfeiture, the wealth gap, crumbling infrastructure, police brutality, net neutrality, etc.) and does it better than anyone in the mainstream media has managed since Walter fucking Cronkite!