Whenever privacy as a topic comes up in discussions on the forums I follow, a lot of people chime in with a fairly dismissive "no harm, no foul" kind of attitude. They don't mind the Eric Schmidts and Jonathan Schwartzes and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world proclaiming the death of privacy, because apparently no-one in the Facebook generation cares.<p>It's odd how when something like this becomes public, when everyday, non-geek people actually appreciate the implications of what is going on, there never seems to be a shortage of people who care, and whatever Schmidt says there obviously are examples of real harm being done.<p>I have been saying for a while that I think privacy and data protection will have to get worse before they get better. Right now, our societies are drifting into a situation where governments and megacorps can build databases for whatever purpose they want, because as long as that is all they are doing, the average guy in the street doesn't know or care.<p>But as we are seeing increasingly frequently now, those databases are subject to both deliberate abuse and accidental compromise. There can be consequences for very large numbers of people and/or very serious consequences for some of those people.<p>We need serious laws, with company-destroying penalties attached, to protect the privacy of individuals and regulate the collection of any kind of potentially sensitive, personally identifiable data in any database, and we need them <i>before</i> the frog is dead.