Stop Thinking the Government Can Fix Privacy

Relying on laws to keep your private information safe is like relying on a dog to guard a plate of bacon.

Some would say that there’s not enough outrage over the privacy violations made by governments and companies around the world. Some would be correct. The outrage isn’t being voiced in ways that one might expect considering the circumstances, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.

The outrage is out there. It’s in here. It’s everywhere. The people of the world are fed up with the activities of our “leaders” who consistently demonstrate a lack of understanding and concern for privacy. Why, then, do we turn to politicians to try to fix things?

They won’t fix it. They can’t fix it. The avalanche started long ago and it is now self-perpetuating. It would take an upheaval of revolutionary levels in order to fix things from the top down and that simply isn’t going to happen. It can’t happen in America. It can’t happen in Europe. It is possible in some countries where the people hold enough anger towards their government that they’re willing to lose everything in order to gain something else, but they have bigger problems to worry about than whether or not someone knows who they emailed last week.

Some would say that the tech companies need to step up. If our private information is the bacon and the governments of the world are the dogs, then the big tech companies are the butchers carving up the pigs. They have absolutely no interest in handing over their cleavers any time soon.

Apple is one of the only major tech company out there that really doesn’t have a stake in the privacy war. They don’t need private data to be successful, while companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon all rely on it like it’s a life-giving IV pumping dollars into their veins. That’s not to say that Apple is more trustworthy or under less influence from the government. Their sins are different. They cannot help us in this situation.

If we can’t look to the government and we can’t look to the tech companies, where can we turn for help? Who can fix this?