Last week, cybersecurity expert Bruce Schneier published an interesting blog post in which he (together with co-author Barath Raghavan) argues that on

Online Privacy: An Endangered Species

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2024-06-11 13:00:04

Last week, cybersecurity expert Bruce Schneier published an interesting blog post in which he (together with co-author Barath Raghavan) argues that online privacy is continuing to decline for the same reason overfishing occurred in the last century – due to the “Shifting Baseline Syndrome.” The presented analogy is a very powerful one, but we still feel that it falls flat in some regards, and in reality, online privacy might even be worse off than suggested.

Schneier states that while scientists started to notice a decline of certain fish populations in the mid-20th century, they failed to grasp the actual scale of the problem for quite some time:

One scientist, Daniel Pauly, realized that researchers studying fish populations were making a major error when trying to determine acceptable catch size. It wasn’t that scientists didn’t recognize the declining fish populations. It was just that they didn’t realize how significant the decline was. Pauly noted that each generation of scientists had a different baseline to which they compared the current statistics, and that each generation’s baseline was lower than that of the previous one.

Because we have lost reference to the proper baseline (i.e., to the initial or natural state of affairs), Schneier argues, we don’t see the big picture anymore and are okay with the downgrade in privacy that’s continuously happening.