Oh, his followup is equally daft: "“I don’t believe that, in many cases, people ‘lost’ any control over their information at all, because they never really had

Oh, his followup is equally daft: "“I don’t believe that, in many cases, people ‘lost’ any control over their information at all, because they never really had any real control even before the Internet existed,” Mr. Cheshire said. “We often conflate privacy through obscurity with inaccessibility, control or security.”" You used to be able to find out certain information (if for some reason it had been reported on) in records offices or, like, on microfiche at your library ... therefore pervasive data-gathering on everyone in a more or less instantly accessible way hasn't changed anything materially. Moreover, conclusion "so you never had control anyway" is only one of several possible results here; another is "so there was a problem all along which, since it's now exacerbated, we should really fix".