The real problem is that the states aren’t very interested in allowing the people to have their privacy rights. Each respective state could put a complete stop to privacy invasions overnight if they wanted to.
1.) Pass a law that prohibits the collection and storage of any location or other private information (other than your own). Make the violation of those laws be felonies and punishable by immediate arrest and incarceration.
2.) In one day, arrest Bill Gates, the CEO of Google, the CEO of Apple, and any other CEO who continues collecting private information after the law is passed. Show these guys all doing the perp walk as they are loaded in to police cars, on the evening news.
3.) Keep all of these CEOs in Jail without bail until their respective companies have pushed out software changes to stop all of the spying. Bill Gates can call Microsoft and say “look, I want out of here ASAP. How soon can you complete the pushouts and purge all of the databases of private information?”.
4.) After these executives get out of jail, continue with their prosecutions. Make sure that both the company and its CEO pay heavy fines and for the CEO, felony convictions. Make the deterrents be big and public.
5.) Make the trading in people’ s private information a felony crime also. Go after the CEO of any company that buys or sells private information.
Most of the spying and tracking of people would go away within a few days after taking the steps above. So we could stop the spying and tracking almost overnight, if we wanted. Our politicians choose not to put a stop to it. Allowing these privacy invasions is not a problem. It’s a choice.
a company that you have chosen to do business with may have a legitimate reason to collect information that would otherwise be private (for example they may legitimately need to contact you!)
a company may be required by law to collect information that you would otherwise choose to keep private (there are things that you can’t do anonymously but blame the government for that, not the company)
and, in the case of the first bullet point, a company may choose to outsource some or all of its operations such that it needs to share some of the collected information with its suppliers. (I hate outsourcing because it means that you are contacted by and affected by companies that you have never even heard of but do we really want to go as far as making outsourcing illegal, at least to the extent that it would necessitate sharing of your private information?)
That’s a bit harsh, isn’t it? since he stepped down as CEO 24 years ago and hasn’t had any involvement with Microsoft in the last 4 years.
There is a difference. If you track me and use the data by your own to train your own AI or just to know everything about me, it’s also tracking, but not sharing or selling. Sharing is an action when you give my data to other parties with known or unknown or even no restrictions. Selling is sharing that costs money (money restriction).
How would I define tracking:
Collecting personal data with information attached to a profile. A profile begins when data can be attached together via any identifier. That can be a name, an ID, an account or similar.
It has to be an action that is not done by users. Creating an account, writing posts and so on is creating data attached to a profile, but no tracking, because it’s done by hand of the user.
Collecting data like a generic counter (how often people open a specific page) is no user tracking (the counter tracks the web page).
Tracking is always about personal data (unlike data collecting in general).
To make an example - counting how often people open a specific page:
A +1 data is not tracking (but data collecting). An array of IPs is tracking where the array length shows the page count. A page count in account profile is also tracking, because the account is created by users, the counter is not and is connected to the profile.
An edge case is on discourse forum software. There is a discussion counter. This is also available on private messages where just two people communicate together. This counter is not personal, because it’s a +1 counter and not account bound. But since only 2 people are communicating, one person can track how often the other person opens that page. It can be even used to look at what time the other person is active (at the time when the counter goes one up - requires activity of the first person). So it’s a kind of tracking, but not as invasive as the problematic form of surveillance capitalism.
We have HIPPA laws to protect our medical records. And yet our medical records are complete enough that those who really do need the information in your medical records (like your own insurance company) can get to the information. But they can’t sell that information nor use it in exploitive ways. The exact same kinds of laws could be passed to cover all other information about you. The banks (for example) should not be allowed to share your financial information with their business partners (people who want to sell things to you if you have enough money based on your bank account balances). The law protects their legal right to do that.
The point is that the lack of will from our political leaders is the only cause that these other privacy violations in our society are allowed to exist. If the law punishes those who trade in your private information, then there will not be a market for your private information.
Google and Apple should be broken up by the courts as AT&T once was. In the break up, the court should order that at least one new company should offer terms of service that completely honor your privacy. All of the other new companies should be ordered to make all advertising on your phone be a strictky opt-in fearure with no clever means to trick you in to opting-in allowed. So then, the so-called free services would dry up and likely disappear. But then, people would start paying for previously free services that they miss having. Some people would then opt-in to the advertising to avoid having to pay for those services. Then people like myself could choose not to opt-in to any advertising or tracking, and pay for any services that I value and want to keep. If all information about you was protected as well as your medical records are protected. That gives us back some rights that have recently been stolen from us.
Yeah, but personal medical information has been leaked because of FB pixels placed on medical web sites. Also medical provider networks have been cracked and personal medical information stolen.
That’s true but “do not track”, in any form, is hardly going to solve that.
The best defence against a data breach is “do not collect” but there are legitimate scenarios where data is collected, medical or otherwise. In that case, the best defence is “do not make accessible from the internet”.