> The privacy battle has to be at the legal layer.
I couldn't disagree more. The way to protect privacy is to make privacy the standard at the implementation layer, and to make it costly and difficult to breach it.
Trying to rely on political institutions without the practical and technical incentives favoring privacy will inevitably result in the political institutions themselves becoming the main instrument that erodes privacy.
Yet without regulation nothing stops large companies from simply changing the implementation layer for one that pads their bottom line better, or just rebuild it from scratch.
If people who valued privacy really controlled the implementation layer we wouldn't have gotten to this point in the first place.
The point we're at is one in which privacy is still attainable via implementation-layer measures, even if it requires investing some effort and making some trade-offs to sustain. The alternative -- placing trust in regulation, which never works in the long run -- will inevitably result in regulatory capture that eliminates those remaining practical measures and replaces them with, at best, a performative illusion.
I couldn't disagree more. The way to protect privacy is to make privacy the standard at the implementation layer, and to make it costly and difficult to breach it.
Trying to rely on political institutions without the practical and technical incentives favoring privacy will inevitably result in the political institutions themselves becoming the main instrument that erodes privacy.