I was reading Bruce Schneier’s recent post on his blog and was thinking “hey, I’ve been meaning to write this.”

In general, this bothers me. What bothers me just as much is the blind acceptance that goes along with it. I’ve often heard the argument of “Oh, I’m sure that all of that information is out there anyhow, it’s no longer worth my effort to try and protect it.” More disturbingly, I’ve heard this argument from people who have been entrusted with the data of others.

On the whole, the US has been lulled into a complacent attitude towards their personal information and privacy. With the steady rise in identity theft, and a weak economy, I really have to wonder when we’ll reach the point of personal identity information being worthless, since none of it can be trusted.

I often think of my bank. Banks are built with the image of security involved. What could be physically safer than a big thick vault? In fact, when I hear of a bank being robbed, it is usually a daytime robbery, which involves bypassing the humans, and not cracking the vault.

Compare that to modern life on the internet. You may do your banking on the internet… how do you know that it’s safe? More importantly, how does the bank know that it’s really you? There are basic protections in place, but with the amount of data about people on the internet, it’s getting very hard to be sure that the person on the other end of the wire is really who they say they are.

I’m increasingly convinced that there is going to be a big technology/privacy “incident” sometime soon. I don’t know what it will be, or who it will effect. I hope we all survive it. More so, I hope we all learn from it, finally.