Some day, people will wake up and realize that all aggregation of data on citizens and consumers–including implicit aggregation, where information is only trans

Some day, people will wake up and realize that all aggregation of data on citizens and consumers–including implicit aggregation, where information is only transiently collected–by governments, data brokers, retailers, or anyone else only makes the inevitable compromise that much more damaging. Today’s highly connected world has ushered in an era with new hidden risks along with the obvious new opportunities. We’re woefully unprepared for these risks when policymakers don’t even know what an ISP is. Time and time again we see appalling breaches of massive repositories of private information, and time and time again we see our politicians and corporate leaders stick their heads in the sand and ignore the root cause. What’s needed is a new paradigm, where data aggregation is outlawed, and where decentralization and previously-fantastic cypherpunk ideas for cryptographic identity verification, blinded signatures, provably-anonymous digital cash systems, and the like become standard. PCI or HIPAA compliance will simply never be enough. Where cryptography can be used to protect individual privacy while providing strong authentication, it must. Where it (yet) cannot, information decentralization is the only way to mitigate the inherent privacy risks. Unfortunately, I worry that a combination of policymakers’ lack of insight, corporate leaders’ pursuit of cost reduction, and “Big Data’s” (or, more aptly, “digital anal rapists’”) penchant for massive warehouses of private information will prevail and ensure the fundamental reforms we need will never see the light of day.