Schneier says the market won't protect privacy.

[tism]

Crypto-guru Bruce Schneier has something to say about markets failing to protect your privacy, and offers some possible solutions:

From: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/06/the_hidden_cost.html

[snip]

What this all means is that protecting individual privacy remains an externality for many companies, and that basic market dynamics won't work to solve the problem. Because the efficient market solution won't work, we're left with inefficient regulatory solutions. So now the question becomes: how do we make regulation as efficient as possible? I have some suggestions:

1. Broad privacy regulations are better than narrow ones.

2. Simple and clear regulations are better than complex and confusing ones.

3. It's far better to regulate results than methodology.

4. Penalties for bad behavior need to be expensive enough to make good behavior the rational choice.

We'll never get rid of the inefficiencies of regulation -- that's the nature of the beast, and why regulation only makes sense when the market fails -- but we can reduce them.

[gisys]

I say don’t give out your info. If you have to give it out and you find out the people that you gave it to are not protecting your individual privacy, stop dealing with them. This is the only true test of a company that wants to keep good profits. As it stands most companies make too much money selling info then they do lousing profit from people getting mad that there shit was sold. If they even know it was or care about it in the first place.

Regulation does not work. When statists jigger this out I will try to shit a golden brick.

[tism]

Regulation is never the answer.

I say don’t give out your info. If you have to give it out and you find out the people that you gave it to are not protecting your individual privacy, stop dealing with them.

You are right. It is the individual's responsibility to take measures to guard his privacy (if he desires!) by making judgments about his potential relationships and limiting what information he gives away. Since information cannot be reliably owned or controlled once it has been communicated, maintaining privacy requires trust. Healthy, mutually beneficial relationships in general require trust.

Now if only we could stop replicating the same information everywhere. The information you give to identify yourself to one organization (for example: your employer) is the same information you use to identify yourself to another (your bank). Then when one of those organization misuses your information, it isn't only a matter of "stop dealing with them," but it is a matter of regaining your "identity."

Can you really think of a good reason to have a static, assigned identity that you use *everywhere*, in a free market? Or is it that the static identification systems we rely on now are valuable only in the context of a controlled market? I'd bet on the later.

[tism]

I mean, one would think a crypto-guru would be able to recognize something as simple as that.

[vertigo]

These false dichotomy type arguments are really silly in whatever form they appear. So the market won't protect privacy according to Mr Schneier, therefore the government will? The government will only protect privacy if it is important to voters, and if it is important to voters (who vote with their wallet) the market will provide.

[Hierophant]

Let's make a tally of how privacy is attacked:

1. by the capital-democratic system.
2. by everything else. (market or not)

Anyone who'd have us bolster 1 to deal with 2 would be cutting off his hand to spite his face.