Privacy not needed?

I'm told that we have no privacy anymore...none whatsoever...and this is why we don't need to review products, services, applications from a privacy aspect. You can argue the same for security and performance...just add memory and cores OK, or, use a longer encryption key?

But actually this touches on many aspects of what is privacy and I'm of the opinion that what privacy offers is the ability to the consumer or user to actively choose what is collected and for what purposes that data might be put.

Overall, however, this places privacy in a very small subset of information management and this is where we really need to turn our focus. Remember the "good days" when databases would be normalised and we worried about the quality of data? Privacy for all its faults and detractors returns us to a point where we need to think about what data we're collecting, how we're storing it and for what purposes it is being used for - that's good information management.