A quarter of a century ago, Scott McNealy, then chief executive of Sun Microsystems, famously dismissed consumer privacy in the internet age as an anachronistic distraction. “You have zero privacy anyway,” he said. “Get over it.” Judging by the way in which consumers have since posted details of their private lives all over social media and breezily ticked the intrusive terms and conditions boxes of many online companies, McNealy may have had a point.
But how we act and what we think can be two different things. Internet users do not appear to have “got over it” when it comes to privacy. Indeed, consumers are now telling pollsters that they increasingly worry about the misuse of their personal data and want stricter controls. A Pew Research poll in the US last year found that 81 per cent of respondents were concerned about how companies collected their data; 71 per cent expressed similar concerns about the government (compared with 64 per cent in 2019).
Such anxieties are all the more acute when it comes to highly sensitive personal information, such as genetic data, which not only affects one individual but all their relatives, too. When you spit into a tube and send it off for DNA testing, you are handing over unique data that cannot be anonymised. You are also sharing information about all your biological family, most likely without their consent. That makes it all the more critical that such data is secure.