Time for third-party data brokers to emerge from the shadows?
The fundamental issue is that the average person in the United States and Austrailia simply don't really care for their online privacy. Offer something free and people will happily sign up and give all sorts of personal information without any hesitation. Offer a loyalty card at a store with discounts, and people will happily sign up for it.<p>Even after the Snowden revelations, not much really happened to the government or the NSA. Even after the Experian breach, the credit rating agencies are still making good money.<p>The underlying reason for this is that except for minorities, most people in these countries never really experienced the downsides of this type of loss of privacy. This is in contrast to Europe, especially Germany where people in living memory experienced first hand how the government could use your private information to literally cause you and/or your family to be imprisoned, tortured, or even killed. Hence, there is a much greater appreciation for privacy in Europe and especially Germany.<p>It is for these reasons that I am pessimistic that the United States and Australia will really take privacy seriously at all in the near future.