Before we can change the government, we need to make people care - and while recent debacles (see: Facebook) have helped, there's a long way to go yet.
Before we can change the government, we need to make people care - and while recent debacles (see: Facebook) have helped, there's a long way to go yet.
Generally, transparency, rather than privacy, could be reasonably said to be the driving function of government -- things like arrest records, court records, marriage records, real estate transactions, are all public records, with exceptions being made only for cases where the harm of the record itself exceeds the public benefit. To facilitate credit markets we've even gone so far as to make personal credit information semi-public.
If you want something to be private, it's your responsibility to keep it private. And all privacy goes away in the face of a lawful search and seizure, accompanied by probable cause. The (very wiggly) privacy line is only crossed when another party goes to unreasonable lengths to violate situations where you have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
A populace which is passionate about a topic is more likely to see legislation about it. But it's not the only way.