Online Privacy and Overfishing

The essay argues that societal expectations of privacy have eroded due to a “shifting baseline” effect, similar to how overfishing normalized depleted marine populations. Using Microsoft’s detection of state-backed hackers leveraging its AI tools as a touchpoint, it contends that cloud-era monitoring and AI-driven services have normalized pervasive surveillance. The authors call for a holistic, ecosystem-wide regulatory approach to define and enforce healthy privacy norms, moving beyond incremental comparisons that mask cumulative decline.