Comment Re:There is no political solution. (Score 5, Insightful) 212
It would be nice if that were the case. Unfortunately it's hard to see how it can be. The technology industry has a poor track record of deploying truly strong end to end privacy protections, partly because the physics of how computers work mean that outsourcing things to big powerful third parties that can be easily subverted is very common. E.g. my mobile phone can search gigabytes of email from the last decade in a split second and rank it by importance, despite having nowhere near enough computing capacity to really do that itself, only because it's relying on the Gmail servers to help it out.
That same phone can receive calls only because the mobile network knows where it is. How do you build a mobile phone that is invulnerable to government monitoring of its location? It doesn't seem technically possible. The only solution is to ensure that anonymous SIM cards are easily obtained and used, but many countries have made those illegal as part of the war on drugs.
This trend towards outsourcing, specialisation and sharing of data to obtain useful features is ideal for governments who can then go ahead and silently obtain access to people's information without those people knowing about it. I do not see it reversing any time soon. The best we're going to achieve in the near term future is encryption of links between devices and datacenters, but this doesn't help when politicians are simply voting themselves the power to go reach in to those datacenters.
Ultimately the only long term solutions here can be political, and I fear we will need a far longer and larger history of abuses to become visible before the majority will really shift on this. The problem is a large age skew. Older people skew heavily authoritarian, if you believe the opinion polls, and are much more likely to support this kind of spying. Perhaps they associate it with the cold war. Perhaps the old adage "a libertarian is a republican who wasn't mugged yet" has some truth to it. Whatever the cause, the 1960's baby boom means that demographically, older people can outvote younger people as a block, and for this reason there aren't really any fiscally conservative, economically trusted AND individual rights-respecting parties in the main English speaking countries. People get to pick between borrow-and-spend socialists with an authoritarian bent, and fiscal conservatives with an authoritarian bent, so surprise surprise we end up with people in power who are authoritarians.