Just watching discussions on the (privacy) safety of the Corona symptom tracker app on my various lists and feel like every single one of my conference papers on “privacy and trust” from the last eight years is coming home to roost.
My example was often a trivial, frivolous “convenience” one: as a privacy paranoid I won’t use fitbits and other fitness trackers because I don’t trust them not to do sneaky, sleazy things with my data. But at least the “loss of opportunity” harm there only affects me.
But I always said that, if we got to a situation where a majority of people started to feel the way I do about these this sort of thing, we might reach a tipping point, where real economic damage occurs through non-participation in new services, technologies and business models.
What we could be seeing now, because of a lack of trust, is people not participating in life-saving research projects for fear that their data will be misused.
This is exactly why we need strong privacy regulation in these situations, not a relaxing of the rules as some idiots seem to suggest. Like we always said we did. #toldyouso
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