Predictions On Privacy For 2014: How Did They Score?

One year ago, we posted predictions for 2014 developments in the privacy field. As the year draws to a close, it’s time to review them before trying to gaze into the crystal ball for 2015.

In January, I posted these five predictions. Let’s review them.

1. Snowden will continue to shock those who understand the implications of his revelations. Hasn’t entirely come true, to be honest. While Greenwald really has spun up The Intercept, and Mike Masnick is doing an incredible job as always over at Techdirt, an increasing amount of material comes not from Snowden anymore. The real shockers in 2014 was non-Snowden material – but then again, those of us who do understand privacy kept being shocked.

2. Oldmedia will continue to not care. Yes, this – the very fundamentals of democracy – remain a strictly underground topic. The irony of it is overwhelming. There were leaks of millions of credit card numbers, and nobody said a thing. There was a leak of some hundred nude photos, and all of a sudden there was an outcry in old media. That’s utterly depressing. Does a privacy leak really have to be something people masturbate to in order to call oldmedia’s attention to what a serious issue this is?

3. The average person hasn’t understood what’s going on. Come true. If you ask a person in the street at the end of 2014 whether it’s reasonable that a random person is basically able to watch their screens on all their devices in real-time, they would dismiss it as unrealistic, or worse, think that they have “nothing to hide”. There is some scepticism against big corporations, but they’re not the ones breaking down your door at dawn if they don’t like what they see.

4. Politicians will continue to pretend nothing happened. Actually, this came out worse than predicted. Some politicians have started fessing up to the wiretapping and gone all chest-thumping about it, posturing as though it’s the moral high ground to wiretap everybody all the time. If you want an example, look at how Cheney defended Gitmo’s torture and human experimentation on innocent people: “I’d do it again in a heartbeat”. Very worrying.

5. Laws enabling mass surveillance won’t go away unless somebody loses their office over it. Nobody has, and they haven’t. This trend still holds true. The first problem a career politician tries to solve is how to get elected. The second problem they try to solve is how to get re-elected. Whatever’s in third place is so far behind it never really matters.

Next week, ending the year, we’ll be looking at trends and trying to predict a little bit of where 2015 is heading.

As always, privacy remains your own responsibility.