And that's because users broadly don't prioritize security + privacy.
Users broadly have no way of analyzing security + privacy. Even most software developers don't have the time or expertise to reverse engineer and analyze even one app, let alone every release of every app they use. They just have to take it on trust. For things like cars we have mandatory standards for vehicle design, crash testing requirements, fuel efficiency and emissions standards etc. to try and make sure that people can expect a certain level of performance and safety. For software there's nothing like that.
People can't all devote time and energy to everything that's important. It's too big a world. We shouldn't conclude that those things don't matter to them. Our current emergency is a fine example: until a pandemic happened, few knew enough to worry about it. But that doesn't mean we were indifferent to the outcome.
Well if the users can't spend any time on it, it isn't sufficiently important for the business to care about it as the users will be briefly miffed and then go on to what they consider important.
User unhappiness matters only so far as it changes behavior.
Industrial food companies were taking significant liberties with food quality and safety. And it was apparently fine! People appeared not to care. Then Upton Sinclair's book The Jungle happened to catch the popular imagination, leading to a wave of outrage and investigations. People still "didn't care" in the sense of, say, not buying industrially produced food. But they did very much care, leading to a regulatory regime that has lasted more than a century.
They show that expectation by withholding their money or not using the product when something bad happens. I don't see them doing much of that when companies have data breaches.
If these things caught the sparkle in customer's eyes, we'd all know it by now.
In terms of popular media, I thought Mr. Robot did a pretty good job of making privacy/security tech seem sexy, even if the main character is usually bypassing it.
Here’s a good example: https://youtu.be/i9CBKGLVCME
If we don't come up with something like that as an industry, eventually somebody else is going to do it for us. And we won't like that one bit.
Strongly disagree. It's just the simple reality that most users don't care about security. The vast majority of potential consumers in the world don't choose digital products based on security. I always see this security angle touted on Hacker News, but I'm quite frankly shocked that people here don't have the self-awareness to realize that we live in an uber-tech geek's echo chamber.
Have you ever met an "average" Facebook user? They really, truly, do not understand or care about security. I'm very confident that even if you sat one down and walked them through all of the implications of what poor security even means, they would walk away and not change their behavior whatsoever.
Adopting the stance that "vast majority of potential consumers in the world don't choose digital products based on security" time-and-time again bites organizations in the ass when there's a breach.
The bite isn't very hard though. The largest data breach of the 21st century in terms of users was Adobe and it cost them just 2 million in legal.
The only painful data breach I can think of financially has been Equifax. Everyone else just sent out a "reset your password" email, paid for a couple lawyers and PR people, and went on with their companies.
Can you name a company killed by a data breach? I can't think of one.
As it is what are the odds of any one user running into issues because of lack of security and privacy? It seems fairly low.
It seems like an opportunity for Apple (assuming they're actually better) to run some scare ads (99% of people scammed via there computer were running Windows/Android) if that's true. If it was true a good ad campaign could get people to care?
For internet stuff how about 98% of the people who got their bank accounts hacked were hacked by leaks of data on Facebook. (probably not true and not provable)
Maybe we need some security insurance who will then audit software and only insure customers that use certified software? They'd have an incentive for their audits to be good because they pay out if it turns out the software is not secure And if their market was big enough then software creators would want to be certified.
It's even possible some standard sandboxes could help make it easy to certify. Add this sandbox to your app and you're certified? Maybe some OSes that already have sandboxes would automatically get certified but server side you'd need audits?
Just throwing out ideas.
Amazon/MS/Google should do a better job of making it hard to leave things unprotected. They are no longer a new service and no longer have the excuse of having to avoid friction.