Thought this would be an interesting thought experiment for the Bitcoin community, seeing as we’re typically anti-big government, but pro-privacy. I’ll leave my personal thoughts in a comment.
The choices are not very nuanced, but go with your gut or whichever one you agree with most.
Should internet privacy be regulated by the government, or should the responsibility remain solely with the individual to keep his/her data private?
Government regulated privacy9.1%
Individuals solely responsible90.9%
22 votes \ poll ended
LOL "government regulated privacy" WTF that means? How do you "regulate" privacy? There's no such thing
reply
Agree, regulating privacy makes no sense
reply
reply
The government is the reason we don’t have privacy
reply
Governments always making jobs for pencilnecks.
reply
Personally, I think the current state of things is such that neither is truly feasible, although the former is more feasible.
Not that feasibility is the sole factor.
I recently said this in another post:
If you send unencrypted data to a server, you are fully reliant on not only their willingness to protect your data, but their ability and competence to do so.
So:
On the “individual responsibility” side of things, seems like people should A: be made aware of the dangers of how their data can be handled and B: willingly choose if it’s worth taking the risk.
On the one hand, a democratically enforced policy that ensures big tech doesn’t do malicious things with our data seems important. On the other hand, even if a tech company or start up wants to handle your data securely, that doesn’t mean they have the bullet proof competence to do so. Everyone gets hacked.
First and foremost, data self custody is a right that should not be infringed. If a person encrypts their own data, they should never be forced to give up the key.
Beyond that, my gut says individual responsibility is where the buck ultimately stops.
And yes, I think that means most people should put significantly less into the internet and web applications.
So much of the internet is a mistake.
reply
You can't keep 100% of your data safe no matter how hard you try. Government has to help to fight agaisnt big-tech anti-privacy schemes.
reply
The government is big-tech. It’s all smoke and mirrors. They actively work to spy on us at all times.
When there is the smallest problem with their surveillance monopoly (TikTok not reporting 100% of their data to NSA) they lose their minds.
Any privacy is 100% the result of the individual only.
reply
Yep. This is so tough. I agree in cases where we’re fully reliant on the internet for things like medical info and other things required to exist in society, but…
I think long term, self-verifiable end-to-end encryption has to be more common place. We should be less focused on building out functionality to be custom for every bit of personal information and more focused on protecting people’s data. But idk, maybe that’s super radical.
reply
deleted by author
reply