Untangling The Incredibly Complicated, Puzzling World Of Online Privacy

Think of all the ways our personal data is collected: through tablets and smartphones and apps and email clients and browsers and myriad web services. The problem has become so fraught that few pretend to have an answer for all of the issue's complexities. A recent interview with Mitchell Baker, chairwoman of the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, underscored this idea. Baker has been a crusader for user privacy, having been involved with the issue for years. "I'm smack in the middle of all of this," she says. But she will be the first to admit that not even the tech-savvy folks at Firefox have all the answers. So not only do we not know what a privacy tool might look like in the future, or whether one could even be created to control the swamp of personal data online, but by the time one could come to fruition, it's also unclear whether our greater society would even need or want it given our forever-changing views on privacy.
As for potential government regulation of online privacy, it represents yet another mystery.