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These were TIME covers from the late 90s and early 2000s..
How times changed.
Judging from those news stand editions, you know that the people of the time, those crazy humans, cared about privacy and wanted to protect their information. Fast forward to the modern age.. Privacy is so 2000 and late.
Now people tell researchers that aren’t worried much about government eavesdropping or their digital life being known to the world.. As a matter of fact, the common consensus is, if we’re not doing anything wrong, why worry? Why so serious..
Here is how the Kansas City STAR reports it and why it is troubling to privacy activists (they still exist?):
Americans - more than Web users abroad, experts say - have come to accept a semi-public digital life. Private businesses make billions of dollars from sweeping up the crumbs of information digital users leave behind. In exchange for all that secret data, private businesses offer a relatively seamless and low-cost Web experience most consumers prefer.
Privacy software can be expensive and is almost always clumsy. And the government wants in: Citing security concerns, the authorities seek “backdoor” access to email accounts and phone records.
So privacy experts are stepping up efforts to convince consumers of the need for digital privacy. A fundamentally private Web won’t be a reality, they say, until ordinary Americans demand broad protection from government and business intrusion into their phone and computer use.
"If anyone in society is going to have privacy, then everybody has to have privacy," said Alan Fairless, CEO of SpiderOak, a company that offers encrypted data storage for consumers.
Some early-adopting digital-savvy consumers have started to seek out and invent privacy protection tools, he said. That work may eventually trickle down more broadly to less tech-handy cellphone users and Web surfers.
The future is now.
Privacy is dead.