Small security thinking misses the bigger privacy picture

Perhaps the most worrying thing about privacy today is that people are failing to see the bigger picture. Literally. Just this last week I was privy to a couple of conversations which can be summed up as concluding with “nobody cares where I was last Tuesday morning so how is revealing that to my circle of friends a security risk” and “good luck with trying to build a profile of me from my online data, I’m careful not to give away too much”. Both of these conclusions are pretty full of holes, much like the argument that small and supposedly random exposures of personal data are no risk to your privacy or security.