Private-Public Partnership

Why does that lead to the conclusion that government will not attempt to prevent cyber attack? Governments are more involved in protecting digital "infrastructure" from foreign attack during what should be peacetime than they are in protecting most societal infrastructure. They may be less reliable than citizens perceive in limiting the efforts of their own listeners, and less effective than they and their citizens would like against the most powerful outsiders, but I'm not aware of any evidence that governments with money to spend are less motivated in these matters than they used to be. What's the evidence?

With the knowledge gained thanks to Snowden, we can change our behavior accordingly - at least theoretically. By we, I mean each and every one of us. I say theoretically because society is distracted easily and technological knowledge and abilities are often lacking. Be that as it may, at least we now know about the occurrence and the scale of government surveillance. What society generally doesn’t appreciate though, is the role the big data economy plays as a facilitator (voluntarily or not) of privacy attacks inflicted upon us.

Evidence? Most of the public opinion research I see suggests that educated users of the Net in many countries think private surveillance is a bigger problem than government listening. What can you point to that leads to the opposite conclusion?

And these private companies are typically not subject to constitutional notions of privacy but rather possess wide discretion to use our data as set forth in their terms of use.

Barrhus Frederic—known universally as BF—Skinner, actually. It would have been better to check.

What are the names being dropped for? I don't associate Dianne Feinstein with Jeremy Bentham much. Is this the Panopticon Bentham? Not really a model for thinking about the national security state, nor an explanation of why the senior Democrat and Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee would take the political positions these senators are predictably taking (again). They're not visionaries imagining some changed form of human society. They're political supporters of the intelligence community whose influence depends on relationship.

The technology description in the last section is not accurate: it's got the usual hype-ful misunderstanding of blockchain storage. If we're going to recommend teaching people more about privacy, we should start nearer to the bottom, so that we don't get caught hyping what we don't fully understand. The best improvement here would be to explain how people learn about privacy technology, so we can think about how to teach them, rather than pointing at some shiny things that may not turn out to be exactly as we imagine them. On the regulatory side, assuming that law is what it says in the books is not a safe assumption. GDPR is what data protection authorities do, so it would be useful to explain the model of their behavior that leads to any specific prediction of the real meaning of the system.