While I laud the call to be optimistic, Equifax debacle taught us that people can be desentized to seemingly constant stream of news about breaches. And that one breach actually affected people's money.. something sacred in US.

I am honestly not sure what would have to happen. Cynical part of me thinks a powerful senator needs to be seriously compromised, exposed and then, if he/she retains power, things might change a little.

Another option is to attempt to run yourself and be the change you want to see, but I have charisma of a wet blanket so it is not an option for me.

> Equifax debacle taught us that people can be desentized to seemingly constant stream of news about breaches.

Well, sure, because "a breach" isn't anything scary in-and-of-itself, it's just the possibility of something scary.

If tons of people were suddenly victims of credit-card fraud or identity fraud due to the breaches, I don't think that would have been desensitizing in the same way, because that's a real consequence, not just the possibility of one.

Equifax. The Uber God mode. Cambridge analytica.

Any one of these on its own should be enough but i'm not convinced the average person on the street could tell you what the deal was with any of these scandals.

None of those things had meaningful impact - either at scale or in newsworthy level awful for a smaller group... without that, the story wasn’t sticky and didn’t scare the masses.

E.g.: When a wave of echo users are blackmailed after their private conversations or sexcapades are snooped on, then you’d see outcry.

I want to believe you but it seems that no matter what happens to Facebook they seem to consistently emerge unscathed.

Equifax was already pretty bad. After that, I imagine there's nothing that can happen to get things to change, even what you're stating. It will be a big deal for a week or two, then completely blow over.

The only way something even as bad as what you stated will cause a change is if it affects politicians directly and they have personal messages and DM's with back-door dealings revealed that make them look bad. Sadly this is typically the only way things get done now is if there's some personal vested interest in the lawmaker.

I'm already thinking of doing any "sensitive" searches (i.e. stuff i would rather google not know, e.g. my mental health state) on google through chrome's incognito mode, but then I think about it more and I realise that if I do a search on incognito mode, the browser probably knows and marks it as an extra special search and hence becomes even more "sensitive" (and reports back to Google)

Tor browser.

Incognito mode does literally nothing. You're still doing your Google search from the same IP address so they still know it's you and store it the same as anything else.

Why fear super secret conspiracies like this? What we already know for a fact is horrible enough.

If you’re worried about Google knowing, you shouldn’t use Google’s browser. While they might not mark searches like that, we don’t know what Chrome does when we tell it to search for something we’re sensitive about.

If you’re worried about Google knowing, you shouldn’t use Google’s search engine!

Same IP increases the likelihood of being the same user tremendously.

> Imagine being able to type in anyone's name and see their entire search history for the last 10 years. It would be total chaos.

South Park plot, Danish Trolls