It may well be in the interests of national security or fighting organised crime – including networks currently exploiting our system – but it is also easy to ignore the consequences. This “tough on cyber crime” response plays into the hands of powerful interests who surf the tougher regulations and penalties to create fresh market opportunities.

There’s the burgeoning cybersecurity industry that serves the national interest while charging a truckload to build stronger and more resilient systems in organisations that handle our data. Perversely, this raises the stakes and drives the proliferation of lone wolves, criminal cartels and state-sponsored networks of evil geniuses dedicated to finding new ways to extract and exploit our most intimate of secrets.

The rapid development of quantum computing and its super-powers of encryption will inevitably make these security walls simultaneously stronger and yet more vulnerable. The same technology that protects us is also used by those who would attack us, creating a cybersecurity arms race in which we are the ultimate losers.

How can we find safer oceans to swim in? That’s where the privacy reform agenda, due to be brought forward by federal Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus before the end of the year, looms large. The poposed reforms, 40 years overdue, would update definitions, review exemptions and create enforceable rights for citizens when their data is misused. It would shift the balance from data abundance to data austerity, creating a right to be forgotten, which would have ensured my details were no longer on the Optus mainframe.

But there is an even more fundamental discussion to be had. If there are, indeed, public interests in proving our identity – and we must be really clear what these are – then we need to find a better way of managing them. Currently, when we open a bank account, take out a loan, apply for an insurance policy, buy a phone or conduct many other mundane transactions, we need to prove who we are.

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We do this by providing OUR information – driver’s licence, passport. And that lets THEM not only hold OUR information but use it in any way we have agreed to in the consent box we ticked without reading.

This could include building a profile of us based on our purchase history, our web use, where we have travelled, and then finding ways of monetising this via advertising, third-party access or even selling to another business. Surely, there are safer waters.

One approach would be to allow the government to vouch for our identity, establishing secure protocols whereby third parties could, with our permission, gain access to verify our identity – but without capturing all our details.

The last time this was suggested was the ill-fated Australia Card, which the Hawke government withdrew in the face of cries of “civil liberty”. But four decades on, when so much of our privacy is already being shared insidiously among commercial interests, I suspect our attitudes may have changed.

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Or if government ID is a bridge too far, we could embrace new protocols designed to give us personal control of our identities. This is the model internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee is championing through his Web 3.0 initiative to give us all a personal “pod” that we would have exclusive control over. Rather than giving up our identity, an organisation would have access for a one-off scan into our personal ecosystem that sits on our mobile phone. A bit like the old days of showing your driver’s licence and then putting it back in your wallet.

The pushback here is, as currently constituted, the management of these pods requires a level of tech literacy beyond the reach of most of us, who will, let’s face it, go on clicking the consent box without reading it.

There may be a middle ground, where we establish public interest co-operatives to manage and control access to our information, an industry super-style fund for our data with a legal requirement to act in our interest.

None of these solutions are simple, but the time is fast running out before our personal privacy is totally washed up. For all of us who are breached as, the data status quo is no longer tenable.

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