A new effort dubbed Project Enigma "guarantees" us privacy, by way of a certain technology. Never mind that Enigma's "magic" (their words) comes from the blockchain and that it's riddled with assumptions; the very idea of technology-based perfection in privacy is profoundly misguided.
Engima is not alone; the vast majority of 'Privacy Enhancing Technologies' (PETs) are in fact secrecy or anonymity solutions. Anonymity is a blunt and fragile tool for privacy; once anonymity is broken, you still need the rule of law to stem abuse. I wonder why people still conflate privacy and anonymity? Plainly, privacy is the protection you need when your affairs are not secret.
In any event, few people need or want to live underground. We actually want merchants and institutions and employers and doctors to know us in reasonable detail, but we insist they exercise restraint in what they do with that knowledge.
Consider a utopian architecture where things could be made totally secret between you and a correspondent. How would you choose to share something with more than one party, like a health record, or a party invitation? How would you delegate someone to share something with others on your behalf? How would you withdraw permissions? How would it work in a heterogeneous IT environment? And above all, how would you control all the personal information created about you behind your back, unseen, beyond your reach?
Privacy is about restraint. It's less about what we do with someone's personal information than what we don't do. So it's more political than technological. Privacy can only really be managed through rules. Of course rules and enforcement are imperfect, but let's not be utopian about privacy. We all know there is no such thing as absolute security, and there is no perfect privacy either.
