The Cost of Privacy

Back in 2020, a mental health service here in Finland was hacked and 22,000 people had their records stolen, ransomed and released publicly, including all of their session notes. The hacked happened due to very poor security, and the average payout for the victims will be 500-1500 euros for attempted or aggravated extorsion. As you can imagine, these were people who were already struggling with life in some way, and the added stress might have been the trigger that pushed some over the edge, and several have taken their life since.

Does that amount cover the damage done?

Unlikely. However, while I was reading an article about the settlements today, it got me thinking more about the cost of our privacy, and sometimes, whether it is even worth it. We have of course been told that our digital privacy is of paramount importance, but pretty much anything stored digitally has a huge amount of exposure, and much of it goes through the datamining companies, or are stored in their systems. Just because the person next to us can't see or have access, it doesn't mean that we aren't seen, or could be seen.

So are we actually private?

Lately in the news, I have also read some stories where they have closed murder cold cases decades after they happened, using genetic data collected from those genealogy websites. While I don't feel for the killers, many of whom died years earlier anyway, it does hint at how data can be used years after the fact, even if we didn't create it ourselves. For instance, the work meeting recordings stored by Microsoft through Teams, or the queries put into OpenAIs APIs.

Will they ever come back to haunt us?

It is a bit like those "topless modelling shots" taken by a boyfriend when a girl was young, and then printed for a magazine after they are elected for parliament. The difference is, there is nothing personal in it at all, no relationship between the photographer and the model, no emotions, just a business model that is looking to maximize profits. Can that model be trusted to keep our data secure not only now, but in a few decades from now?

I suspect not.

And even if the data leak is due to a mixture of incompetence, negligence, or bad actors like the one mentioned above, the result is the same. We are exposed. I think that while we can try and limit our exposure by being careful with what we share, in this day and age, we should probably assume that nothing is secure eternally and that everything has the potential for getting out into the public eye. For the majority of us, there might not be anything of interest for others, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have value in some way or another. The information is already valuable, as it is being used for access to social networks and to train artificial intelligence, so who is to say what the value of it will be in a decade from now.

But outside of all of the hacking and privacy, I wonder how much the mental cost is to worry about and deal with our digital security. I suspect that for many it is usually a low stress level, but at times it might get quite high, depending on circumstances. I assume that is going to bear mental and emotional load, and impact on our health in numerous ways. We probably haven't had to worry too much about privacy until the recent past, and in an already complex environment, the cost of our privacy might be higher than we realize we are paying.

Is the return worth it?

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]