Perhaps it’s time for a federal privacy law if even local governments want in on the analytics action.
Some problems necessitate that, but most do not, this being one of them.
I can't find the source, but I read a strong argument about the difficult of moving between nations, states, and municipalities, and the conclusion was that the more localized the legislation, the greater freedom people have. "Vote with your feet"-type deal.
So the more local the policies the lower the barrier to choose them.
If someone from California buys a summer house and registers a car to keep in Vermont to garage there and never drives it to California, I wonder if California considers Vermont violating their new privacy law since no opt-out but wonder if they could really enforce it on Vermont anyways. Seems like uncharted territory, but I know some companies have said they plan to follow the sticker privacy laws even if you live outside of California or Europe since it's easier to developed processes that way.
Seems like privacy law in the US is all over the place. One for banking, one for children, one for education, one for health, one for email marketing and then laws scattered all over the different states. Then I think there's even a specific law about library books checkout history too. So seems bad for startups or even mid size companies to keep up with it, especially if states start saying it applies even if you don't have a office in California.
Then if you have a service, legal requests for peoples data you have to handle and the more popular you are, the more common people might misuse your services. For example drug dealers were using Sony Playstations to communicate with each other and then Jussie Smollett for example, Google has to hand over a year of Gmail relating to the hoax he pulled(Maybe he talked to others using Gmail when planning it), but I think if he was a European citizen then providers have to decide to break US or European law, but some stuff is as clear as mud. I feel in that case they'd follow the warrant and deal with breaking European law as I don't think they'd have much choice as a catch 22.
So even if you are trying to do the right thing following the law - maybe even helping get a dangerous criminal of the streets, so many conflicting privacy laws and different agencies responsible for different ones too. Not sure though if Europe has gone after any companies for handing over data to a foreign government relating to a valid legal request where they have offices or data centers but seems you could be screwed either way when trying to decide how to handle the conflicts. Then there was a case involving Microsoft, just because you are a US company if you keep servers anywhere in the world the US can subject them to requests. So sounds like a mess for a company to decide how to handle these edge cases where things conflict, so standardizing on one would help give businesses clarity. Maybe even treaties too.
All of these are directly or indirectly influenced by policy.
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Would you move purely because of a DMV privacy policy? No, probably not. But the basic principal of being able to choose your government by your location is sound.
At the extreme local level, consider HOAs. Their presence certainly influences people's choice to live there.
>Would you move purely because of a DMV privacy policy? No, probably not. But the basic principal of being able to choose your government by your location is sound.
But doesn't that last sentence invalidate the first? If no one actually moves based off privacy law, the idea of allowing people to choose their own privacy law through voting with their feet is pointless in practice.
I don't think HOAs are a good comparison because it is trivially easy to move a couple blocks within a city in comparison to moving to a different state or country. Also a lot of problems within HOAs stem from interpersonal conflicts and not fundamental differences in political ideology.
Exactly. Extreme example of how the more localized we can keep politics, the better people can choose their government.
> If no one actually moves based off privacy law
A. Just like employment, there is a totality of factors to consider.
B. That should tell you how important it is.
> Also a lot of problems within HOAs stem from interpersonal conflicts
Have you ever seen state or national news?
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I'm suggesting that as a rule, it's best to localize policy when possible.
Even if you disagree with the principal of "vote with your feet", there is still the point of how unnecessary it is to have 300 million people reach a consensus on DMV operation, when all you really need is the couple million it actually affects.
Using this logic, why doesn't every block in the US have their own local government? The reason is that these things don't scale linearly and that some decisions need to be made on a large scale in order to be practical. You can't have individual blocks creating their own privacy legislation and expect companies to be able to meet every law in every jurisdiction. There is a reason you have probably gotten dozen of "We have updated our privacy policy" emails over the last two months and that is because of the CCPA. Are we supposed to go through that process every time any individual municipality adjust their laws? Coming to a consensus on a singular approach to something like that is much more efficient even if large groups of people are unhappy with the final law.
I think Vermont DMV is best solved at the Vermont level.
I'm not really a huge fan of HOA's personally, but maybe if I was a millionaire with a mansion some are nice, but some HOAs are just regular people with like 100K home values. So not only do you have the city telling you what you can do with your property, you have people who couldn't get elected to a real city government telling you what you are allowed to do with your property on top of what the city and state says.
Right now the only HOA I think I'd want to live at is the Golden Oaks one, which is a real estate development at the Walt Disney Resort, but not rich enough yet for that... Can dream I guess haha. One of the Walmart executives has a house there though, so super wealthy people. I think a lot of it is just vacation homes, but I'd like it year around. But only because of the location and being a huge Disney fan, otherwise I hate HOAs in general but maybe some other areas I might be a fan but in general I rather live without one... So many HOA horror stories online. but if I was some millionaire, living in a gated community I think I'd feel safer.
I would worry more about neighbors who don't keep up their property in a neighborhood of cheaper homes than a neighborhood of millionaires.
Housing is a similar issue, if circumstances call for subsidized housing, it’s often easier to move to a big city like NYC.
Schools are another big reason. If you have kids and live in place with poor governance like Kansas, you’ll likely benefit from moving.
There are also snowbirds who return to northern states for medical reasons, usually due to different policies.