Schneier: Fight for online privacy or kiss it good-bye

If the public wants online privacy it had better fight now for laws to protect it because businesses won't and individuals don't have the clout, security expert Bruce Schneier told RSA Conference.

The longer information-privacy policies go unset, the more likely it is that they never will be set, says Schneier, an author of books about security and CTO of security consultant BT Counterpane. As young people grow up with broad swaths of information about them in the public domain, they will lose any sense of privacy that older generations have. And they will have no appreciation that lack of privacy shifts power over their lives from themselves to businesses or governments that do control their information. Laws protecting digital data that is routinely gathered about people are needed, he says. "The only lever that works is the legal lever," he says. "How can we expect the younger generation to do this when they don't even know the problem?"