"The best laid plans of mice and men"

Standards are great. They are how we got the automotive assembly line, aircraft, and most ever form of modern technology.

As far as I am concerned privacy died many years ago when the transformation of our society, culture, and economy warped into interconnected systems. Looking back I pause to think if all the integration and connecting of systems that for decades were "stand alone" was truly a good thing. The classic paradigm of easier access, greater efficiency, and lower cost with little concern for the long term impact to the individual.

The question that I have been considering is "What makes you and individual in the new paradigm of the digital world?" Individualism in the classic sense has vaporized and replaced with information about you freely available to anyone who makes the effort to obtain and capitalize on your data. Which leads into "What is your data" and "Do you own data about yourself"?

I believe it is safe to say that today I do not control nor do I have hope of controlling my data. The cow left the barn a long time ago.
The worst part of it is; I don't even know what the cow looks like so there is no hope of finding it and getting it back.

Microsoft and all the big data giants want to get as much data about us as possible to directly correlate that data into market power. It would be naive to think that Google, MS, or any other entity with so much data would not use that medical data for "other" purposes such as population health trending. Individual health tracking with outputs such as higher premiums if a persons health records indicate a down slide. After all folks who are sick are the ones who drain insurance systems and cost the most; eh?

I believe one of the main challenge for us as security practitioners is to set the standard for what it means to be a digital human. What rights are incurred as a digital human and what controls should be in place to protect those rights? The laws of the United States may never catch up to the ever changing technology which creates a security void that must be filled if we are to assure the basic rights assured under the US constitution and US Bill of Rights. To an extreme it could be argued that today we have all blindly forsaken our rights in the name of convenience and assumed the risks without fully understanding the full value of what was given up so freely in the first place.

Could any of us have imagined that data mining on a global scale would directly translate into such power controlled by so few and even worse those that seek to do us all harm?