Have we just given up on data privacy?

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carrino.

Every day as consumers, we're confronted with the fragility of our personal data privacy.

Another data breach, another government agency accessing databases they didn't previously have access to,

another consent form popping up to get permission to gather more data.

It's almost too much for any one person to

keep a handle on, according to Rohan Grover. He's a professor of AI and media at American University,

and he recently co-authored a piece for the conversation about why data privacy seems to have

largely fallen out of the public discourse, even though he believes

the topic is more urgent than ever.

The Trump administration has been encouraging the federal government to share data across

agencies to support its agenda, including targeting individuals for deportation.

So, for example, in June, it was announced that immigration

agents would be given access to Medicaid data, and that's actually what initially prompted

this article. So we noticed that while communities have turned out in droves to protest the

ICE raids themselves, we don't see the same surge in advocacy around data scandals and

privacy violations like this one, even though they are part of the same broader system.

And so my co-author, Yash Raderer and I wanted to highlight how something that may sound

technical and complex like a data sharing agreement deserves perhaps be met with the same

level of protest.

Yeah, tell me more about kind of what you see as a lack of urgency around this issue.

...