Tech
Why people don’t demand data privacy, even as governments and corporations collect more personal information
When the Trump administration gave Immigration and Customs Enforcement access to a massive database of information about Medicaid recipients in June 2025, privacy and medical justice advocates sounded the alarm. They warned that the move could trigger all kinds of public health and human rights harms.
But most people likely shrugged and moved on with their day. Why is that? It’s not that people don’t care. According to a 2023 Pew Research Center survey, 81% of American adults said they were concerned about how companies use their data, and 71% said they were concerned about how the government uses their data.
At the same time, though, 61% expressed skepticism that anything they do makes much difference. This is because people have come to expect that their data will be captured, shared and misused by state and corporate entities alike. For example, many people are now accustomed to instinctively hitting “accept” on terms of service agreements, privacy policies and cookie banners regardless of what the policies actually say.
At the same time, data breaches have become a regular occurrence, and private digital conversations exposing everything from infidelity to military attacks have become the stuff of public scrutiny. The cumulative effect is that people are loath to change their behaviors to better protect their data − not because they don’t care, but because they’ve been conditioned to think that they can’t make a difference.
As scholars of data, technology and culture, we find that when people are made to feel as if data collection and abuse are inevitable, they are more likely to accept it—even if it jeopardizes their safety or basic rights.
Where regulation falls short
Policy reforms could help to change this perception, but they haven’t yet. In contrast to a growing number of countries that have comprehensive data protection or privacy laws, the United States offers only a patchwork of policies covering the issue.
At the federal level, the most comprehensive data privacy laws are nearly 40 years old. The Privacy Act of 1974, passed in the wake of federal wiretapping in the Watergate and the Counterintelligence Program scandals, limited how federal agencies collected and shared data. At the time government surveillance was unexpected and unpopular.
But it also left open a number of exceptions—including for law enforcement—and did not affect private companies. These gaps mean that data collected by private companies can end up in the hands of the government, and there is no good regulation protecting people from this loophole.
The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 extended protections against telephone wire tapping to include electronic communications, which included services such as email. But the law did not account for the possibility that most digital data would one day be stored on cloud servers.
Since 2018, 19 U.S. states have passed data privacy laws that limit companies’ data collection activities and enshrine new privacy rights for individuals. However, many of these laws also include exceptions for law enforcement access.
These laws predominantly take a consent-based approach—think of the pesky banner beckoning you to “accept all cookies”—that encourages you to give up your personal information even when it’s not necessary. These laws put the onus on individuals to protect their privacy, rather than simply barring companies from collecting certain kinds of information from their customers.
The privacy paradox
For years, studies have shown that people claim to care about privacy but do not take steps to actively protect it. Researchers call this the privacy paradox. It shows up when people use products that track them in invasive ways, or when they consent to data collection, even when they could opt out. The privacy paradox often elicits appeals to transparency: If only people knew that they had a choice, or how the data would be used, or how the technology works, they would opt out.
But this logic downplays the fact that options for limiting data collection are often intentionally designed to be convoluted, confusing and inconvenient, and they can leave users feeling discouraged about making these choices, as communication scholars Nora Draper and Joseph Turow have shown. This suggests that the discrepancy between users’ opinions on data privacy and their actions is hardly a contradiction at all. When people are conditioned to feel helpless, nudging them into different decisions isn’t likely to be as effective as tackling what makes them feel helpless in the first place.
Resisting data disaffection
The experience of feeling helpless in the face of data collection is a condition we call data disaffection. Disaffection is not the same as apathy. It is not a lack of feeling but rather an unfeeling—an intentional numbness. People manifest this numbness to sustain themselves in the face of seemingly inevitable datafication, the process of turning human behavior into data by monitoring and measuring it.
It is similar to how people choose to avoid the news, disengage from politics or ignore the effects of climate change. They turn away because data collection makes them feel overwhelmed and anxious—not because they don’t care.
Taking data disaffection into consideration, digital privacy is a cultural issue—not an individual responsibility—and one that cannot be addressed with personal choice and consent. To be clear, comprehensive data privacy law and changing behavior are both important. But storytelling can also play a powerful role in shaping how people think and feel about the world around them.
We believe that a change in popular narratives about privacy could go a long way toward changing people’s behavior around their data. Talk of “the end of privacy” helps create the world the phrase describes. Philosopher of language J.L. Austin called those sorts of expressions performative utterances. This kind of language confirms that data collection, surveillance and abuse are inevitable so that people feel like they have no choice
Cultural institutions have a role to play here, too. Narratives reinforcing the idea of data collection as being inevitable come not only from tech companies’ PR machines but also mass media and entertainment, including journalists. The regular cadence of stories about the federal government accessing personal data, with no mention of recourse or justice, contributes to the sense of helplessness.
Alternatively, it’s possible to tell stories that highlight the alarming growth of digital surveillance and frame data governance practices as controversial and political rather than innocuous and technocratic. The way stories are told affects people’s capacity to act on the information that the stories convey. It shapes people’s expectations and demands of the world around them.
The ICE-Medicaid data-sharing agreement is hardly the last threat to data privacy. But the way people talk and feel about it can make it easier—or more difficult—to ignore data abuses the next time around.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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OpenAI sent 80 times as many child exploitation incident reports to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children during the first half of 2025 as it did during a similar time period in 2024, according to a recent update from the company. The NCMEC’s CyberTipline is a Congressionally authorized clearinghouse for reporting child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and other forms of child exploitation.
Companies are required by law to report apparent child exploitation to the CyberTipline. When a company sends a report, NCMEC reviews it and then forwards it to the appropriate law enforcement agency for investigation.
Statistics related to NCMEC reports can be nuanced. Increased reports can sometimes indicate changes in a platform’s automated moderation, or the criteria it uses to decide whether a report is necessary, rather than necessarily indicating an increase in nefarious activity.
Additionally, the same piece of content can be the subject of multiple reports, and a single report can be about multiple pieces of content. Some platforms, including OpenAI, disclose the number of both the reports and the total pieces of content they were about for a more complete picture.
OpenAI spokesperson Gaby Raila said in a statement that the company made investments toward the end of 2024 “to increase [its] capacity to review and action reports in order to keep pace with current and future user growth.” Raila also said that the time frame corresponds to “the introduction of more product surfaces that allowed image uploads and the growing popularity of our products, which contributed to the increase in reports.” In August, Nick Turley, vice president and head of ChatGPT, announced that the app had four times the amount of weekly active users than it did the year before.
During the first half of 2025, the number of CyberTipline reports OpenAI sent was roughly the same as the amount of content OpenAI sent the reports about—75,027 compared to 74,559. In the first half of 2024, it sent 947 CyberTipline reports about 3,252 pieces of content. Both the number of reports and pieces of content the reports saw a marked increase between the two time periods.
Content, in this context, could mean multiple things. OpenAI has said that it reports all instances of CSAM, including uploads and requests, to NCMEC. Besides its ChatGPT app, which allows users to upload files—including images—and can generate text and images in response, OpenAI also offers access to its models via API access. The most recent NCMEC count wouldn’t include any reports related to video-generation app Sora, as its September release was after the time frame covered by the update.
The spike in reports follows a similar pattern to what NCMEC has observed at the CyberTipline more broadly with the rise of generative AI. The center’s analysis of all CyberTipline data found that reports involving generative AI saw a 1,325 percent increase between 2023 and 2024. NCMEC has not yet released 2025 data, and while other large AI labs like Google publish statistics about the NCMEC reports they’ve made, they don’t specify what percentage of those reports are AI-related.
Known as the “Doomsday Glacier,” the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica is one of the most rapidly changing glaciers on Earth, and its future evolution is one of the biggest unknowns when it comes to predicting global sea level rise.
The eastern ice shelf of the Thwaites Glacier is supported at its northern end by a ridge of the ocean floor. However, over the past two decades, cracks in the upper reaches of the glacier have increased rapidly, weakening its structural stability. A new study by the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC) presents a detailed record of this gradual collapse process.
Researchers at the Centre for Earth Observation and Science at the University of Manitoba, Canada, analyzed observational data from 2002 to 2022 to track the formation and propagation of cracks in the ice shelf shear zone. They discovered that as the cracks grew, the connection between the ice shelf and the mid-ocean ridge weakened, accelerating the upstream flow of ice.
The Crack in the Ice Shelf Widens in Two Stages
The study reveals that the weakening of the ice shelf occurred in four distinct phases, with crack growth occurring in two stages. In the first phase, long cracks appeared along the ice flow, gradually extending eastward. Some exceeded 8 km in length and spanned the entire shelf. In the second phase, numerous short cross-flow cracks, less than 2 km long, emerged, doubling the total length of the fissures.
Analysis of satellite images showed that the total length of the cracks increased from about 165 km in 2002 to approximately 336 km in 2021. Meanwhile, the average length of each crack decreased from 3.2 km to 1.5 km, with a notable increase in small cracks. These changes reflect a significant shift in the stress state of the ice shelf, that is, in the interaction of forces within its structure.
Between 2002 and 2006, the ice shelf accelerated as it was pulled by nearby fast-moving currents, generating compressive stress on the anchorage point, which initially stabilized the shelf. After 2007, the shear zone between the shelf and the Western ice tongue collapsed. The stress concentrated around the anchorage point, leading to the formation of large cracks.
Since 2017, these cracks have completely penetrated the ice shelf, severing the connection to the anchorage. According to researchers, this has accelerated the upstream flow of ice and turned the anchorage into a destabilizing factor.
Feedback Loop Collapse
One of the most significant findings of the study is the existence of a feedback loop: Cracks accelerate the flow of ice, and in turn, this increased speed generates new cracks. This process was clearly recorded by the GPS devices that the team deployed on the ice shelf between 2020 and 2022.
During the winter of 2020, the upward propagation of structural changes in the shear zone was particularly evident. These changes advanced at a rate of approximately 55 kilometers per year within the ice shelf, demonstrating that structural collapse in the shear zone directly impacts upstream ice flow.
The friction-pole mechanism for headband adjustment is no less agricultural, for all its familiarity where Grado headphone designs are concerned. And while the detachable cable is a fair bit more flexible than some older Grado models, that’s not the same as saying it’s meaningfully flexible. If there’s a more willfully unhelpful length of cable in all of headphone-land, I’ve yet to encounter it.
On the subject of the cable: Grado provides 180-ish centimeters of it with a 6.3-mm termination at the end. When you’re charging this sort of money for headphones, it’s not outlandish to imagine your customer might have a device that accepts a balanced connection. Frankly, why there isn’t a choice of cables in the packaging is, frankly, beyond me. It’s something that the overwhelming majority of Grado’s rivals provide as a matter of course, and though the company’s website suggests there are forthcoming cable options “including a variety of lengths, as well as balanced terminations such as 4-pin XLR and 4.4mm,” these have been “forthcoming” for quite some time now, and will have a cost attached.
Photograph: Simon Lucas
I’m in no position to doubt the effectiveness of the “B” ear cushions where sound quality is concerned. After all, the Signature S750 sound superb, and Grado suggests the cushion design is a contributing factor. What I do feel qualified to say, though, is that the raw-feeling foam of the ear cushions is not especially comfortable, and that it retains and returns the wearer’s body heat with something approaching glee. “Premium” and “luxurious” are not words that apply.
Ultimately, it depends on what your priorities are. There’s certainly no arguing with the way the Signature S750 sound. They’re uncomplicatedly impressive and periodically quite thrilling to listen to, depending on the mix. But unless you’re one of those hair-shirt hi-fi fundamentalists from back in the day, one of those listeners who somehow doesn’t believe outstanding sound quality is valid unless there’s some suffering attached, there may well be too many shortcomings to overlook when it comes to these Grados. “Hand-assembled in Brooklyn, USA” notwithstanding.
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