We’re rapidly approaching a time when every moment of our day will often be recorded by devices that we carry on our person. At the same time, the incentives — both economic and social — to share as much as possible are increasing. As we record more and more data about other people we interact with, we become responsible for how that data is used. This has all the makings of not only a privacy disaster (from an academic perspective), but a social disaster, as the normal folkways and mores around what it means to have a private conversation or moment are upturned.
There is a way through: when technology creates more problems the answer is more technology. The fix is a mix of protocols, data standards, and well-designed user experience that can restore the fluidity and trust to our social interactions, even in the face of ubiquitous recording.
And the final upshot? This restoration of peer-to-peer privacy may be the vector through which we finally create the holy grail of privacy: ubiquitous consent frameworks that enable and require data owners — individual, corporate, or governmental — to respect the wishes of data subjects around the use of their data.
