Something I read long ago (and can't find) was that privacy is a relatively recent part of humanity. In the past, we lived in small groups where everyone knew each other very well. Now we live in big groups, which provide pseudo-nymity. One of the things I keep coming back to in my head is a way to democratize the information collected about us. Right now, certain "people" (including companies and government organiza…
- information asymmetry: to make things democratic & symmetric, you would have to open up information about those in enforcement. Historically there is a strong resistance to that (though transparency would be welcomed). Even if it were to work at a domestic level, the defense sector still primarily relies on security through obscurity. "National interest" then becomes a convenient way to hide things.
- processing asymmetry: those who have the compute and skill to better access and correlate information will have a big advantage. Compare your ability to (hypothetically) download what you want about anyone, with an organization that houses all the data themselves and deployed Splunk/Watson/Palantir/whatever to massage that data exactly how they want.