Personally I think this development is actually a good direction. People need to feel the pain before they react.
So far privacy has mostly been attributed to "some internets movements". But if everyone (incl. politicians and their families) are impacted, privacy should hopefully become a more central issue for policy makers.
I will be very interested to see the effect when the "privacy watershed" event happens. Which I'd be amazed if it didn't happen sometime within the next 10 years or so.
By that I mean something on the scale of the entire facebook database being exposed or a gigantic number of personally identifiable google searches being released.
It may not even be something that happens due to malicious activity, it could be a company choosing to do something with data that impacts a large number of people's lives in a very direct way.
I will be very interested to see the effect when the "privacy watershed" event happens.
I would put money on nothing happening.
There have been large scale credit card leaks before, without any real lasting impact.
There have been "facebook stalking" murders.
What privacy violation could possibly be worse? I suppose genocide based on something in some online profile is theoretically possible, but even in countries where there is risk of state-sponsored attacks on people based on their online profiles (Egypt, Iran, Syria etc) there has been no real change in behaviour.
"People" (speaking in averages here) seem comfortable enough (or too lazy to do anything about) with companies knowing pretty much everything there is about them, even in the worst circumstances possible.
I would guess that most people don't quite grasp what the data could be used for and assume that it more secure than it (probably) is. people also seem to assume that stuff that is marked "private" on facebook is actually private in the sense that nobody will ever be able to access it.
Stalking murders I imagine are pretty rare and will only affect a small number of people, even so I imagine people who know people who have been murdered because of facebook are somewhat more skeptical of it.
Having your credit card stolen isn't actually such a big deal, you can usually just cancel, get a new one and have the fraudulent charges reversed.
Having stuff like your preferences in porn or the conversations between you and the person you are cheating on your spouse shown off to the world, that stuff can hurt.
Should we make an effort to produce technology to help people cheat on their spouses and not get caught? I'm not saying you're off-base, but pick better examples.
So far privacy has mostly been attributed to "some internets movements". But if everyone (incl. politicians and their families) are impacted, privacy should hopefully become a more central issue for policy makers.