I was curious this week about how attitudes to privacy have changed over time. Have attitudes shifted as the internet has burrowed deeper and deeper into our lives?
There has always been a hard core who care about privacy, who use the tools and build them. I wanted to know about everyone else. Has the wider public warmed to privacy technology over the past 45 years?
I pulled the surveys: Alan Westin’s Harris polls in the late-1970s through Pew, Cisco, and the marketing industry’s own research.
The answer is that things haven’t moved as much as you might think. Westin found a heavy majority of Americans in the early-1990s saying they had lost control over how companies used their personal information.
Pew put the same figure at 91 percent in 2014. Its 2023 survey found most people still concerned about companies, more worried about the government than they were, and about two-thirds saying they understand little or nothing about what happens to their data.
Cisco has asked 2,600 consumers in 12 countries the same questions every year since 2019 and the concern line is flat. Forty-five years, Snowden, Cambridge Analytica, a decade of horrendous breaches, and the public says today roughly what it said when the web was nothing but email and AltaVista.
Some numbers did shift. Westin’s “privacy unconcerned” group was 10 percent of Americans in 2003; a 2021 industry survey, using his three categories (but a different pollster) found the same group at 31 percent. Worry about government data use rose from 64 to 71 percent between 2019 and 2023, with most of the change coming from Republicans (Democrats stayed put).
What to make of this?
The surveys show that concerns about privacy haven’t shifted much since 1979. People were already concerned back then. What has shifted is the technology people will actually use. HTTPS, iMessage encryption, WhatsApp encryption, Apple's tracking prompt. None of them was sold as privacy tech and all of them reached more people than anything that was.
Billions of people got privacy without changing their minds about anything, because it arrived inside something they were already using. The only survey finding with real hope in it fits the same pattern. Cisco found that people who know their country has a privacy law feel able to protect their data at nearly twice the rate of people who don’t. Structure changes behaviour where sentiment can’t.
For crypto, that settles an older debate. Privacy coins spent a decade trying to recruit converts and the shielded pools stayed relatively small. The private stablecoin doesn’t need converts because people already use stablecoins.
It’s less of a jump to ask someone to use a private stablecoin for a payroll app or treasury desk than a privacy coin. The pragmatists will take it the way they took HTTPS. They won't notice, and that's the point.
Privacy Roundup
OpenAI previewed Private Safety Processing, which detects risk patterns across related interactions without giving its personnel access to underlying prompts or responses.
Venice AI crossed $100 million in annualized revenue. The AI platform provides private access without retaining prompts or requiring a conventional account identity.
Google showcased HEIR, a Private Computing Toolkit component that converts pretrained models to process encrypted inputs using homomorphic encryption without exposing the underlying data to the server.
Helius ran a live workshop in which an AI agent built an application on Solana Rings, its privacy protocol that settles transactions directly on Solana while hiding the transactors, asset and amount.
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Till next time.