Looks like Dan Geer wants to divert attention from the 'legal' masters of corporatism to the corporatists themselves....
It depends on whether you believe that a promise of procedurally satisfactory data handling can be relied upon. Quoting (as I'm on the record) from "Tradeoffs in Cyber Security," given last October at the Univ. of North Carolina, Charlotte. http://geer.tinho.net/geer.uncc.9x13.txt <snippet> Today I observe a couple fornicating on a roof top in circumstances where I can never know who the couple are. Do they have privacy? The answer is "no" if your definition of privacy is the absence of observability. The answer is "yes" if your definition of privacy is the absence of identifiability. Technical progress in image acquisition guarantees observability pretty much everywhere now. Standoff biometrics are delivering multi-factor identifiability at ever greater distances. We will soon live in a society where identity is not an assertion like "My name is Dan," but rather an observable like "Sensors confirm that is Dan." With enough sensors, concentration camps don't need to tatoo their inmates. How many sensors are we installing in normal life? If routine data acquisition kills both privacy as impossible-to-observe and privacy as impossible-to-identify, then what might be an alternative? If you are an optimist or an apparatchik, then your answer will tend toward rules of procedure administered by a government you trust or control. If you are a pessimist or a hacker/maker, then your answer will tend towards the operational, and your definition of a state of privacy will be mine: the effective capacity to misrepresent yourself. </snippet> --dan ===== the above and other material on file under geer.tinho.net/pubs