I see an important part of the debate is recognising there are two distinct parts to privacy Secrecy is where you prevent others from having knowledge of a pie

I see an important part of the debate is recognising there are two distinct parts to privacy Secrecy is where you prevent others from having knowledge of a piece of data, or explicitly share it with a limited set of others whom have the same ability to shield the knowledge. This is not privacy obviously. 1. loss of control of knowledge. This is often the bit we worry about. We want to keep control over our data and data about us. But mostly this ship has sailed. Even if there was some reduction in tracking cookies and so on, the usefulness of widespread data collection (from traffic warnings to epidemiology) is enough for most of us to want those benefits in society 2. loss arising from others knowledge or use of data To me this is the kicker. The use by others of our non-secret data-about-us should be at the level of medical data - held and used in the patients best interests. We are entering a world of trolley problems - from how to code driverless cars reactions to what is an is not acceptable use of private data. We need to recognise there is huge upside value in the tracking that happens now (and I hope we will see those benefits whatever) but there are pollution-like downsides and we can massively limit those. The cost benefit analysis should make society judge the loss of a few million(#) in advertising revenue worth this (#) I am dubious about the value assigned to privacy-breaching tracking to drive advertising versus say using the words people type in a search alone to give them a result.