Companies betrayed you, covered up hacks and renounced their responsibilities, and some just gave up any last damn they had about users.

In his last days in office, President Obama relaxed the rules on which intelligence agencies can get raw data collected by the NSA, including the spying on Americans (which supposedly was illegal until Obama authorized it).

In 2017, the NSA lost control of its stolen hacking tools that let nation-state hackers infect hundreds of thousands of computers with a backdoor later used to deliver WannaCry ransomware.

And who can forget the Equifax breach, whose crappy security practices let hackers steal all your data that you didn’t know they had and didn’t ask for them to take in the first place?

FCC chairman Ajit Pai pushed through a rule change late in the year that lets Internet providers monitor and save more from the data on its customers.

But wait, there’s more! Zack Whittaker wrote about many of the privacy disasters of 2017 in ZDNet at: http://zd.net/2kNFF1k.