I remember thinking at the time that Obama’s Data Privacy Fact Finding committee was likely to be sidetracked (and co-opted by advertising giants Facebook and Google and telecoms like Verizon and Comcast and their soldiers among the MIT high tech intelligentsia).
That feeling emerged as the conference events ensued, which revolved around encryption and differential privacy and other of the hemming and hawing that characterize the corridors of technology power.
A colleague and I agreed the theme that emerged most prominently was that data was the "new gold" or the "new oil" -- it seems overblown (why not the "new tulips"?), until you see a room full of policy and commerce people discussing how much data is going to change the world as we know it. Ad nauseum.
Whether they were right or wrong, we more or less settled, was less important than the palpable sense that something akin to gold or oil ''fever'' was in the air. Which brings us back to Facebook, seen in a new light, given the way its data (your data) ended up in the hands of Cambridge Analytica.
The Times's recent editorial avows there is no reason to start from scratch when it comes to data privacy today, that Obama's privacy proposals of 2012 and thereafter, for a basis for data rights. I am not so sure there was much inthe way of real changeat work there. I don't want to sound relativistic like the Trump cracker contingent, but there wasnt much different between the left and right when push came to shove on privacy back in 2004. - Jack IgnatiusVaughan
Related
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/01/opinion/facebook-lax-privacy-rules.html
https://itsthedatatalking.blogspot.com/2014/03/encryption-and-differential-privacy.html