"As we become an increasingly digitally connected world, the loss of privacy and security are almost inevitable. But if we don’t adopt stronger data security laws, said Northeastern professor Woodrow Hartzog, we might be left with a digital landscape that could be marred by chaos and deregulation.
The extent of the risk came blaring through with Marriott’s disclosure last month that hackers had exposed the personal information of up to 500 million customers. No sooner had Americans had time to digest that bit of bad news than Quora announced that 100 million of its user accounts were compromised.
Hartzog, who teaches law and computer science at Northeastern, paints a bleak picture of a dystopia that could debilitate our entire data ecosystem if measures to address data security that would safeguard Americans aren’t taken soon.
“If people lose the ability to trust those who are collecting our data then ultimately we’ll all lose, because we’ll lose the promise of the data ecosystem; we’ll lose out on the potential of artificial intelligence and other benefits to be gained from these information technologies,” Hartzog said."