Peak indifference: privacy as a public health issue

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My latest Locus column, “Peak Indifference”, draws a comparison between the history of the “debate” about the harms of smoking (a debate manufactured by disinformation merchants with a stake in the controversy) and the current debate about the harms of surveillance and data-collection, whose proponents say “privacy is dead,” while meaning, “I would be richer if your privacy were dead.”

Smoking’s harms were hard to pin down in part because the gap between cause (a drag on a cigarette) and...