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Lessig: Future Tech Will Help Privacy Catch Up With the Internet (wsj.com)
An anonymous reader writes: In a new interview, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig shared his view of the future of privacy in this age of data breaches. "The average cost per user of a data breach is now $240 — think of businesses looking at that cost and saying, 'What if I can find a way to not hold that data, but the value of that data?' When we do that, our concept of privacy will be different. Our concept so far is that we should give people control over copies of data. In the future, we will not worry about copies of data, but using data." Lessig sees new technological advancements as the key to shoring up our privacy, which has been eroding since the dawn of the internet. Being able to act on data without holding it is key: "If I ping a service, and it tells me someone is over 18, I don't need to hold that fact. The level of security I have to apply [is not] the same [that] would be required if I was holding all of this data on my servers. This will radically change the burden of security that people will have."
But that is exactly the point the article makes:
Holding (sensible) data also comes with a cost. Securing the data has a cost and a risk attached to it.
If the cost of 'pinging' is lower than that, then the idea may hold true.
If.
And this of would require standards so that these data accesses can smoothly run in the background between all parties.
The cost of breaches is never going to be enough to offset the value of having the data, any more than the cost of insurance and lawsuits has offset the value of dangerous (to employees, nearby residences, ...) workplaces and operations caused companies to be extra careful. It's just perceived as a cost of doing business.
Only when executives and board members do long hard prison sentences for data breaches will they ever give up collecting every scrap of data they can acquire.