SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submitted via IRC for Bytram
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/08/opinion/sunday/privacy-congress-facebook-google.html
In the past year, Congress has been happy to drag tech C.E.O.s into hearings and question them about how they vacuum up and exploit personal information about their users. But so far those hearings haven't amounted to much more than talk. Lawmakers have yet to do their job and rewrite the law to ensure that such abuses don't continue.
Americans have been far too vulnerable for far too long when they venture online. Companies are free today to monitor Americans' behavior and collect information about them from across the web and the real world to do everything from sell them cars to influence their votes to set their life insurance rates — all usually without users' knowledge of the collection and manipulation taking place behind the scenes. It's taken more than a decade of shocking revelations — of data breaches and other privacy abuses — to get to this moment, when there finally seems to be enough momentum to pass a federal law. Congress is considering several pieces of legislation that would strengthen Americans' privacy rights, and alongside them, a few bills that would make it easier for tech companies to strip away what few privacy rights we now enjoy.
American lawmakers are late to the party. Europe has already set what amounts to a global privacy standard with its General Data Protection Regulation, which went into effect in 2018. G.D.P.R. establishes several privacy rights that do not exist in the United States — including a requirement for companies to inform users about their data practices and receive explicit permission before collecting any personal information. Although Americans cannot legally avail themselves of specific rights under G.D.P.R., the fact that the biggest global tech companies are complying everywhere with the new European rules means that the technocrats in Brussels are doing more for Americans' digital privacy rights than their own Congress.
The toughest privacy law in the United States today, is the California Consumer Privacy Act, which is set to go into effect on Jan. 1, 2020. Just like G.D.P.R., it requires companies to take adequate security measures to protect data and also offers consumers the right to request access to the data that has been collected about them. Under the California law, consumers not only have a right to know whether their data is being sold or handed off to third parties, they also have a right to block that sale. And the opt-out can't be a false choice — Facebook and Google would not be able to refuse service just because a user didn't want their data sold.
[...] Where the Warner/Fischer bill looks to alleviate the harmful effects of data collection on consumers, Senator Josh Hawley's Do Not Track Act seeks to stop the problem much closer to the source, by creating a Do Not Track system administered by the Federal Trade Commission. Commercial websites would be required by law not to harvest unnecessary data from consumers who have Do Not Track turned on.
A similar idea appeared in a more comprehensive draft bill circulated last year by Senator Ron Wyden, but Mr. Wyden has yet to introduce that bill this session. Instead, like Mr. Warner, he seems to have turned his attention to downstream effects — for the time being, at least. This year, he is sponsoring a bill for algorithmic accountability, requiring the largest tech companies to test their artificial intelligence systems for biases, such as racial discrimination, and to fix those biases that are found.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday June 13 2019, @01:45AM (1 child)
Because, uh... privacy. We used to have it. Some of those privacy rights were legislated or came about through court rulings; in other cases (as in many of those dealing with the "right to be forgotten" stuff) privacy often happened de facto because searching old records was hard. But there are legal precedents in various countries going back centuries that hint at a limit to how long a "scarlet letter" should follow you around in your life.
To your assertion, personal data is NOT "history." History, as normally understood, is a narrative constructed by historians to connect historical facts -- in essence, to tell the "story" of a culture at a particular time or an event or whatever. Most private individuals who are not famous during their lifetimes were not traditionally part of "history" per se. You have no objective "right" to read about other people's actions of fifty years ago anymore than you have the right to enter their house and rummage through their old letters and other records. They are private individuals.
Now, of course, aggregation of data and new search technologies have made this question more complicated. Now people are often able to easily dig up old records about individuals from public databases, newspapers, etc. There used to be a way of bringing a lawsuit against someone who did that and then used it to shame someone publicly -- it was (is?) a tort called "false light." That is, you may make a true statement about a person, but if it draws attention unfairly to that person in the public eye, it might be similar to libel.
I'm not saying the way the EU is dealing with "right to be forgotten" stuff is ideal or even a good way to handle it. But if you believe at all in privacy rights, then you have no objective "right" to know everything about someone's personal history, even if it might exist in some public source somewhere. How to deal with that in the modern age is a difficult question, but it is a question we should ask.
(And if you have a kneejerk reaction against this, please do remember that there are numerous cases where people get unwanted attention even for things they didn't do. Newspapers publish breaking stores about "alleged" pedophiles or rapists or whatever all the time, and some of them turn out to be acquitted. Sometimes the prosecutions were complete overreach and even BS to put pressure for some other reason. These things have happened. They may not be the majority of prosecutions for such crimes, but they HAVE happened. Yet newspapers rarely publish a front-page story when someone random is acquitted of a crime, let alone when the charges are silently dropped when the prosecution realizes its case is crap. But that info remains out there now... how is someone to deal with that? It's not just people trying to hide inconvenient info about bad acts: sometimes people are trying to change the fact that their online profile has been severely distorted by half-truths or completely misleading statements about them.)
(Score: 1) by Z-A,z-a,01234 on Thursday June 13 2019, @12:45PM
Oh man, you totally nailed it!