When I see the frequent news stories about theft of personal data, such as the recent theft of medical records of more than 160,000 individuals from the University of California at Berkeley, I start to fear that Scott McNealy, former CEO of Sun, may have been correct when he said “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”
Computer and networking technology has allowed private data to be stored in databases to make it readily accessible to those who have a legitimate reason to access it, but in the process have made it entirely too susceptible to unauthorized access. It is easy to blame this on programmers for writing shoddy software, and there certainly is some truth to that, but no matter how good the software is, there will still be problems with the people authorized to use the databases making mistakes such as using weak passwords.
Even if it’s a losing battle, we should fight tooth-and-nail to try to hold onto privacy. As Dylan Thomas wrote, “Do not go gentle into that good night. [...] Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”