SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submitted via IRC for Bytram
Senate takes another stab at privacy law with proposed COPRA bill
Perhaps the third time's the charm: a group of Senate Democrats, following in the recent footsteps of their colleagues in both chambers, has introduced a bill that would impose sweeping reforms to the current disaster patchwork of US privacy law.
The bill (PDF), dubbed the Consumer Online Privacy Rights Act (COPRA), seeks to provide US consumers with a blanket set of privacy rights. The scope and goal of COPRA are in the same vein as Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which went into effect in May 2018.
Privacy rights "should be like your Miranda rights—clear as a bell as to what they are and what constitutes a violation," Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), who introduced the bill, said in a statement. Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), and Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) also co-sponsored the bill.
The press release announcing the bill also includes statements of support from several consumer and privacy advocacy groups, such as Consumer Reports, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology, and the NAACP.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 27 2019, @10:28PM
All of the stuff your talking about isn't defined in a way that can be clearly compared against evidence.
A lot of people will look at this law and think they know what it says. But they won't know how it translates into telecom regulations or tort law. My initial impression is that just getting lawful standing for litigation based on this law will be extraordinarily difficult. This law is not written like commercial law. It isn't written like telecommunications law either. But it presumes to speak authoritatively about both. Which is why it is confounding to the purposes to which it is authored.
So yeah. The law says sort of what you said. But you probably said it better than the law does. I read it thinking to myself: "What cases would this law support?". I got to the end of the document without tallying a single one.
"Let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good."
I guess we define "good" differently. In my mind "good" would mean that the law would be useful for the purposes of civil rights litigation. I can think of a couple of ways this law would confound a claimant. I can't think of any where this law would measure clearly against presented evidence. It is possible to deny ground, while conceding even more ground somewhere else.