With the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) going into effect on January 1, 2020, I think it’s timely to look at how digital natives may change the way we view data privacy altogether. If you were a toddler when Voyager 1 and 2 buzzed Saturn in 1980 and 1981 respectively, you are a digital native, as is anyone who came along after you. Maybe you started high school when email and file-sharing started going mainstream, and by the time you graduated, The New York Times had a homepage, at least one of your parents was likely online, and we, consumers at large, were beginning to experience FOMO (fear of missing out) if we weren’t online.
Ubiquitous tracking and big data pools as we know them today weren’t even a glimmer in a mad data scientist’s eye back then — and yet, people born before we learned who shot J.R. (or digital immigrants, as they came to be known) had already been making privacy mistakes for years.
Privacy Habits of the Past
Although the term was coined in the 1960s, identity theft has been with us for much longer. This author shares a name with a notorious horse thief, born Henry McCarty in the 19th century American Wild West. This scoundrel misappropriated the name William Bonney from an obituary in a New Jersey newspaper before he went west and famously fell into considerable mischief.
Two generations after his demise, the U.S. government began handing out identifiers for the new Social Security program. That’s where the trouble began in earnest. Many states put that number on their state-issued driver’s licenses — and this practice wasn’t banned until 2005. When M ..
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