Apr 10, 2014 | Wendy M. Grossman, founder and former editor of the magazine “The Skeptic”

Consumers used to waking up every week or so to news of yet another Internet security hole or data breach may be hard-pressed to understand why Heartbleed, the hole in the commonly used Web security software OpenSSL, is different. But it is: Such diverse and nonalarmist security commentators as Bruce Schneier, along with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Ars Technica, have all dubbed the bug “catastrophic.”

“On the scale of 1 to 10, this is an 11,” Schneier wrote on his blog yesterday.

So: What is it? How do you know if it affects you? What should you do about it?

SSL—for Secure Sockets Layer—is a protocol used ubiquitously on the Web to protect confidential user information in transit. This includes, but is not limited to, user IDs and passwords, credit card details, and other personal information. When you see HTTPS at the beginning of the address in your browser’s address bar, that syntax indicates that SSL is in use to encrypt the traffic between your computer and the Web server at the other end. Increased used of SSL to protect the queries and messages users type into search engines, Webmail, and social networks so they cannot be read in transit has been an important part of the Web’s response to Edward Snowden’s revelations of endemic National Security Agency spying on Internet traffic.

More, from Scientific American.

Besides, any government sinister enough to spy on its citizens surreptitiously and illegally would be perfectly capable of simply fabricating any lies it wanted to pin on them anyway. I’m not worried about people reading my mail when they already have perfected the means to forge my signature.

Sure, security is important. No one wants their credit card numbers to be made public, or have criminals learn their bank account passwords, or for their internet porn browsing habits to be exposed. But most of this hysteria about security is based on an exaggerated feeling of the importance on our own activities. Even the constitutional aspects of privacy meant little to our founders. Except for the 4th amendment, there is little mention of it in our Constitution or in the Catalogue of Usurpations of the Declaration of Independence. As for those protections in the Fourth, its pretty clear they refer primarily to the reluctance of 18th century Gentlemen Of Property to having the King’s tax collectors snooping through their books. In the 18th century, (just as today) privacy was a luxury of the rich. Besides, Uncle Sam already knows how much money I make and how much I have stashed away.

I don’t mean to be cavalier about privacy and security, I certainly don’t want my wife to learn of my torrid affair with Scarlett Johansson. Its just that I am not quite as sensitive of my personal information (or perhaps the ability of others to review it) as other folks are. My secret life is quite boring.

What I am really concerned about is the ability of my consumer behavior to be monitored, analyzed and then exploited with targeted advertising. When I browse a website on say, Civil War re-enactments, I am not happy to suddenly see myself on the mailing list of merchants providing those folks with memorabilia and merchandise. This consumer espionage is not an assault on my individual privacy as much as it is an attack on our collective privacy. When merchants have the ability to learn more about me than I can about them, it perverts the free market for all of us. They have intelligence they can use against us, and we have none allowing us to defend ourselves against them. Free markets don’t work when one side has more information than the other.

I say go for it.