When will we take back our privacy?

Back in 1999, I remember being extremely agitated when Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy said, "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it!" regarding consumer privacy protections. "How arrogant is this guy?" I remember asking. Little did I know he was speaking the truth, albeit earlier than most of us wanted to hear it.

His outlandish claim has since been backed up more recently by online juggernauts such asGoogle's Eric Schmidt and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. InfoWorld's Galen Gruman wrote an excellent article that should serve as a wake-up call about how end-users' personal privacy is being jeopardized.

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Zuckerberg knows our kids and ourselves better than the rest of us, thanks to all the data we surrender to Facebook -- knowingly and otherwise. Making matters worse, today's kids have grown up without a sense or expectation of online privacy. They don't understand the value of it in a free society or what its loss can mean. Most young adults probably don't appreciate the importance of our Constitutionally protected freedoms against unreasonable search and seizure.

Why should they? Nearly the entire world sniffs their network traffic at will. Social media sites turn their private settings into public data in an instant. Many of the most popular websites bury their privacy terms and settings so deeply that you'd have to fall down the rabbit hole to find them. And when you do read the privacy settings, they are often obscure and overly general, and they don't clearly communicate what information is being collected or how it is being used. There are many exceptions to this, but offenders rule.

Spam continues nearly unbated. Unsolicited phone calls and snail mail still accumulate despite numerous supposed consumer protections. Everyone is used to courts saying that it is legal for the police to look through our garbage and follow us via GPS devices without a court warrant. Pesky things like probable cause and evidence just get in the way.

Criminals are routinely tracked using cellphone coordinates, e-toll records, and stoplight cameras. That doesn't bother me. What does, however, is that many stoplight cameras record the license plate of every single car that passes regardless of whether that vehicle committed an infraction. You even have malls trying to track everything a person does through his or her cellphone without prior notification or the ability to opt out.

But what really gets me riled up are the U.S. Fusion Centers. These multiple, geographically disperse centers aggregate public and nonpublic sources of information about individuals. Initially created after 9/11 and supposedly only to track defined terrorists, they now track many, many other individuals. As of 2011, there are at least 73 known Fusion Centers in the United States.

Fusion Centers now track cellphone conversations, satellite feeds, landline telephones, texting, email, and social media site postings. They track bank records, credit cards, daycare centers, DMV records, Game and Fish records, mortgage deeds, and hotel records, and they're partnered with many of the world's largest companies. And they are doing all of this without a warrant and probable cause. Our founding fathers would be amazed at what the governed have allowed the governing to do.

A lot of readers (and certainly their kids) might not understand why it's such a big deal that our government is collecting so much information about its citizens. Who cares if the police stop you once in a while? If you're innocent, you'll be inconvenienced a bit and let go, right?

But our founding national laws specifically state that you should not be inconvenienced without probable cause. Inconvenience is the least of it. Just look at all the countries in which police forces invade private homes and take law-abiding citizens prisoner, to be tortured or never to be seen again.

When government gets information, it always abuses it. It collects too much information, too broadly, then uses it for illegal reasons -- always! You don't have to believe me. Read any ofJames Bamford's books on the U.S. intelligence agencies. My favorite is "The Puzzle Palace," though some people prefer his more recent "Body of Secrets." Both of them are chock-full of historical examples of government abuses. Reading them will change your mind about the leaking of our information as innocent and harmless acts. They will free you of the misconception that our own elected officials follow the laws regarding how it handles the information we've allowed them to collect.

I guess that is what bothers me the most. We are, as never before, allowing private companies and our governments to collect our private information. We are giving it up like it's an expectation. And in many cases we're begging for the loss of privacy. InfoWorld's Galen Gruman brought up several more cases of corporate privacy invaders, which seem so positive today, but in all likelihood will be used to harm us in the future. The digital world is making it happen so much faster than I expected.

Of course, Scott McNealy told us all about it in 1999 -- and George Orwell before him.

This story, "When will we take back our privacy?," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Keep up on the latest developments in network security and read more of Roger Grimes's Security Adviser blog at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, followInfoWorld.com on Twitter.