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from the Why-doesn't-the-US-just-implement-the-GDPR? dept.
U.S. Unveils First Step Toward New Online Privacy Rules
The US administration called Tuesday for public comments on a "new approach to consumer data privacy" that could trigger fresh regulations of internet companies.
The Commerce Department said the announcement is part of an effort to "modernize US data privacy policy for the 21st century."
The move follows the implementation this year of ramped up data protection rules imposed by the European Union, and a new privacy law enacted in California.
Both measures will impact internet firms whose websites can be accessed around the globe.
Privacy and data protection have come into greater focus in response to these new laws, and also because of growing concerns on how private data is handled following revelations on the hijacking of millions of Facebook user profiles by a political consultancy ahead of the 2016 election.
"The United States has a long history of protecting individual privacy, but our challenges are growing as technology becomes more complex, interconnected and integrated into our daily lives," said David Redl, who heads the agency's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Sunday September 30 2018, @04:43PM (5 children)
The battle for privacy is a lost cause, and we'd be better served fighting a different battle, for fairness and against prejudice. For example, for a job interview, the employer is not supposed to discriminate on the basis of race or gender, but keeping that info private, to hide that from an interviewer for an in-person interview, is impractical. Age is a little more concealable, but only by so much, perhaps 20 years at most. Instead, what the smart employer should do is run interviews as blindly as practical.
It was always hard to keep secrets, and sometimes it was counterproductive. Now Big Data, analytics, and forensics makes that a lot, lot harder. Analysis of video footage of a person's face, and walk, and hand movements are way better than that silly polygraph lie detector test, and might also be able to tell if you're a drug user, ill, prone to cancer, Parkinson's, or ALS, and a conservative or a liberal, or a liar, cheater, sore loser, or quitter, among many other things. Or, for that last bit, just look at a person's record.
An essential skill for a good poker player is the ability to bluff. Most people are terrible at not giving themselves away.
I wonder how the 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination can last.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 30 2018, @11:22PM
"The battle for privacy is a lost cause"
I imagine a lot of people said similar things while they were chained up in blackbirders. Lost cause for YOU maybe, pussy.
"fairness and against prejudice"
That is misdirection.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 01 2018, @02:01AM (3 children)
You're either working for the elites or you're a useful idiot. I'm heavily leaning towards the latter. When you give up, your defeat becomes certain. Imagine if the civil rights movement just gave up when things seemed hopeless, or any other influential movement throughout history.
There is absolutely no reason that we cannot ban mass surveillance and create sensible privacy regulations besides corruption in our political system, which needs to be fixed or mitigated anyway. After all, it is large corporations and government agencies that are responsible for the most egregious privacy violations, and organizations that large cannot hide their surveillance for long. Because of that, it should be possible to ban their surveillance and punish them as needed, if the political support is there.
To start, ban all forms of mass surveillance. That includes license plate readers, string ray devices, the NSA's bulk data collection, and facial recognition done on a large scale.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 01 2018, @02:56AM
"ban all forms of mass surveillance"
A lot of this stuff is already a crime. What we've got is one acquisance to cognative dissonance stacked on top of another evolving in parallel to the technology. Eventually you get the point where calling it anything other than a crime is no longer plausible. Each company looking around and saying "hell if everybody is doing it, we'll take it a step further." And after a decade, it is just straight up crime.
The only thing that makes anything litigable is whether you can make a reasonable argument before a judge that you have standing. And to do that, you have to be able to demonstrate a loss. The thing is, that the 4th codifies an inherent value to privacy. Being deprived of it without informed consent, is by constitutional definition, a loss. For why would they have encoded it, if it wasn't valuable? So standing _should_ be trivial to prove.
There are wiretapping laws. The distinction between analog and digital is a straw man. Really anybody who understands much of the technology can clearly demostrate that before a jury. So the question isn't "What laws need be passed?" But rather: "Why hasn't anybody brought the appropriate charges yet?"
The question is not legislative, but punative. The crimes exist. Congress will endeavor to create carveouts, mostly just to sandbag any future litigation. But for the moment, they are still just crimes.
Part of the issue here is the lack of math in the judiciary. After Wikipedia v. NSA, math doesn't seem to actually be a thing to the judiciary. So do you now have to actually have access to the switches being used to do this shit, and maybe print out the logs or whatever, on a dot matric tractor feed, or one of those old typewriter ball printers from the 70's. Or maybe unbolt the fucking thing from the rack and bring it in and drop it on the floor?
IOW, the more you look into this, the more you realize that there is some question, whether we are even a nation of laws anymore. Whether the boneheaded out of touch judiciary is even able to understand value in the digital age is in question. And congress will respond in the same way congress always responds. With graft, corruption and ineptitude. And SCOTUS will respond by passing batshit activist benchlaw on subjects they clearly don't understand, instead of kicking the can back to congress, who are more than happy to let SCOTUS take the responsiblity. To reinterate, are we even a nation of laws anymore?
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday October 01 2018, @03:49AM (1 child)
We have established that no one has a right to privacy in public. For instance, citizens are allowed to video the police while they are at work, and that is a good thing. It has exposed police violations of our rights that victims have been complaining about for years, but without the video proof the police could deny it and get away with their conduct. Now they can't.
Similarly, employers have a pretty well established right to monitor employees. Stories of simplistic metrics unfairly being used to judge employees are legion. Employees can choose not to work for such employers, but we all know that is often not a viable option.
The red light cameras and similar programs show what happens when surveillance is abused. Those programs have been riddled with cheating, and it became glaringly obvious that safety was merely a pretext and the real object was ticket revenue. The public has gotten wise to it, and is shutting those programs down.
There is public backlash against the NSA's illegal, warrantless spying, and on that one, we do have an expectation of privacy. The mail has always been sacrosanct, and that protection was extended to telephones. There's been arguing about whether Internet communications should be extended the same protections, and I'd say the consensus is a pretty safe yes on that. For example, the MAFIAA has not had much luck pushing others into helping them unmask people whom they allege are committing piracy. Until the day comes that sharing of information is an established right, privacy is our major protection against their wrongheaded interpretation of intellectual property rights.
But privacy on a platform such as Facebook? Forget it. If you don't want the world to be able to find out something, SHUT UP! DON'T POST ABOUT IT ONLINE and DON'T USE YOUR REAL NAME! However, one of the biggest problems with Facebook is your loving circle of friends who might blab.
Search engines remembering everything you ever searched for is a tough problem. Perhaps we can look at public libraries for precedent. On occasion, law enforcement has wanted to know what books a particular patron looked at and checked out, and libraries have denied them. To make extra sure they won't be compelled to divulge such information, they deliberately do not keep it. On this, privacy regulations can help, for a while.
But all in all, there's just too much info. I really can't see privacy regulations stopping Big Data operations from putting together a thorough picture of any individual they care to investigate. In all that data, there'll be things that an intolerant public considers immoral, and therefore can be used against you. Like the governor says in All the King's Men, there's always something. I think a better solution is not trying to keep it hushed up, but rather, trying to increase tolerance.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 01 2018, @05:20AM
Only short-sighted authoritarian fools have established this. Stop repeating this nonsense as if it cannot be changed or questioned. With the right judges in place, these standards can change.
The reality is that mass surveillance of all sorts is inherently dangerous to democracy. [gnu.org] This is because, in addition to tracking ordinary people, it also tracks whistleblowers, journalists, political opponents, dissidents, and other people who play pivotal roles in democratic societies. Obviously, as we've seen time and time again, the government seeks to destroy people who challenge it, and mass surveillance enables it to do so on a level never before seen. Then, we also have dangers such as parallel construction. [wikipedia.org]
Because of that, even mass surveillance of public places needs to be banned. There is no inherent reason why it cannot be, except people stupidly insisting that being in a public place means that anything done to you is acceptable.
That is not mass surveillance. It is not in any way equivalent to mass surveillance. Mass surveillance is not done by individual people, but by large, powerful, and well-equipped organizations that have enough resources to install a vast surveillance infrastructure; that is where the true danger lies at this time.
Much of Facebook's business model should be outright illegal, and especially their shadow profiles they create on people like me who don't even use their disservice. If banning such practices made Facebook and similar companies disappear, then good.
People often defend Facebook and similar companies by saying that using them is "voluntary." For the most part, that is true, even though it can be less than voluntary if many employers require their use. However, as with the shadow profiles example, the people who volunteer to use these disservices create significant negative externalities that eventually begin to affect those who choose not to be used. Not to mention, most people don't have a good understanding of why it is so dangerous to allow such massive scale data collection, instead viewing it as a harmless trade-off.
Obviously money in politics has to be done away with first, but I see no reason why they can't be stopped. Again, large organizations like this cannot completely cover up their surveillance, and so getting them to comply shouldn't be an impossible task in a less corrupt system.