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is there hope?
I feel this all the time. There is so much data over which I have so little control (SSN, birthdate, address, phone #) -- anything I do with me kids requires massive data hemorrhages. And I don't see how I can avoid it.
Here's an example: signing my kid up for a sports competition and everything on the form is required. Do they actually need my address? No, but I can't sign him up without inputting it. Try calling: nobody knows how to change it because the form is a third party thing. Great. Also: they want a picture of him for his "profile" -- I used a cartoon image I generated. Of course then at the competition his is the only picture that isn't a real life photo. It's all small stuff, but it all adds up to total exposure.
I don't know how to live life without being laid bare like this. And I get the sense that it hasn't even begun to be used against us yet.
I think that for the past 50-60 years, we've seen the results of tech outpacing legal/political understanding and the protections proposed. Things like the EU cookie fiasco that makes every website visit a pain in the behind while doing nothing to improve (and worse, stagnating) solutions for real cookie management. And that is just a visible example.
What we're left with is archaic solutions from the typewriter & phone era that happen to be the SOP you are to follow.
I think that the truth is more pale than missing understanding: even if your counterparty was understanding the privacy issue, doing something about it can land them in a world of trouble. Procedure, procedure. And you better follow these.
Many of those procedures are ossified. They're not ready for 2005 tech, in 2026. This is going to hurt even more now that anyone can correlate data with maybe 3 attempts at instructing GPT to write them an algo they could never think up themselves, with 90% accuracy on the result. After half a day of prompting, at most.
90% is no good on the defensive side. But its good enough on the offensive side. Infinitely better than having nothing. And this change in asymmetry, that isn't even dependent on AI, is not accounted for. Big data isn't accounted for. Heck, "small" 100GB databases with PL/SQL on Oracle 5 isn't truly accounted for. Check out (state) procedures around SSN handling - to name something common and vulnerable - and be afraid, be very afraid.
Sometimes I wonder: is there hope? I can defend myself, though only to a point. I have yet to succeed in defending someone else.