Stop Saying, 'We Take Your Privacy and Security Seriously' (techcrunch.com)

Security reporter Zack Whittaker writes: In my years covering cybersecurity, there's one variation of the same lie that floats above the rest. "We take your privacy and security seriously." You might have heard the phrase here and there. It's a common trope used by companies in the wake of a data breach -- either in a "mea culpa" email to their customers or a statement on their website to tell you that they care about your data, even though in the next sentence they all too often admit to misusing or losing it. The truth is, most companies don't care about the privacy or security of your data. They care about having to explain to their customers that their data was stolen.

I've never understood exactly what it means when a company says it values my privacy. If that were the case, data hungry companies like Google and Facebook, which sell data about you to advertisers, wouldn't even exist. I was curious how often this go-to one liner was used. I scraped every reported notification to the California attorney general, a requirement under state law in the event of a breach or security lapse, stitched them together, and converted it into machine-readable text. About one-third of all 285 data breach notifications had some variation of the line. It doesn't show that companies care about your data. It shows that they don't know what to do next.

Comments

Re: And

[Anonymous Coward]

SJWs care about n1ggers and shitty sand monkeys. That's all that matters.

Some do

[rsilvergun]

Bernie Sanders and Liz Warren come to mind. Martin Luther King was an SJW. Yeah, there are some bastards out there, mostly preying on frightened women and minorities in the exact same way the religious right prey on church goers. But your criticism should be directly carefully, like a scalpel. Right now it's more like a machete wielded by a South African Death squad.

I mean that, btw. Just like those Death Squads got wiped up into a frenzy the anti-SJW crowd is getting the same. They're not actively committing murder, but give it a few more economic crashes, some food shortages due to climate change and throw in mass unemployment due to automation and we'll get there in no time flat.

Nothing's really changed with humanity. We're just as fragile and violent as we were when the Aztecs were doing mass human sacrifice. We should be aware of that and careful to stop it from getting to that point again.