There's a way to achieve the stated goals: have the government come down real hard both on the low-level data crime and the big players that are supposedly legit.
Burn it all down.
Burn it all down.
I doubt the forefathers would have thought there needed to be a law against me passing on info.
Probably not, since it created a new powerful orgabization (the federal government) and mandated it to go around classifying everybody by a particular set of feature (whether they were a “free person”, an “indian not taxed”, or an “other person”.)
Given that when the framers were scared of a powerful organization doing something, their first concern tended to be about government doing it, and their response tended to be to prohibit at least the federal government from doing it, I think the fact that they mandated the federal government to do it indicates that it was neither something they feared nor something they failed to fear out of lack of consideration.
I mean the Bible tells us about censuses by the Romans ~5BC, so depending what's in your list ...
Easier said than done. What we're seeing is advertising as a business carried to its logical conclusion. If you "burn it all down", you have to end, in effect, all advertising. Advertisers try to target their budget as effectively as possible; the more they know about their target demographic, the better able they are to do that.
It's like the US tax code... it is insanely complicated and in a lot of ways doesn't serve the public well (because rich folks can use the complexity of it to escape taxation), so it's easy and popular to say let's just get rid of it and start with a new, simple tax code.
The problem is it got to be the way it is for a reason. We want to incentivize people to own homes and buy electric cars and a thousand other things, and we use the tax code to do that. If you tear it down without a plan on how to keep incentivizing all the things you want, you're going to end up with some undesirable results that you then have to fix.
It's fine to say let's throw it out and start over, but if that's as far as your plan goes then it's pretty lazy.
And what do we want to replace targeted ads, surreptitious tracking, and a system that exploits its users for money while not being held accountable to its users with?
I'd say we're better off with nothing. So yes, in this instance, burn it all down actually is a solution.
I'm aware I'm ignoring the externalities, I'm aware it's complicated, and I'm aware what I'm proposing actually is lazy. I'm aware a bunch of people will lose their jobs (mostly in tech though so I really don't feel bad, having spent most of life in that industry). I'm saying in this instance it doesn't matter. We're still better off burning it all down.
And if you as the user want to share no data at all, you should have that option. This is the company's problem, not the customer's problem - or at least that's the world I want to live in.
And obviously don't hide anything behind dark patterns, and all the other common sense gotchas. Violations should be treated as criminal fraud with prison time (assuming they are found guilty in a court of law, and proving criminal fraud is notoriously difficult but the threat needs to be real).
[If we want] to incentivize...
While it's true that incentivization necessitates tax code complexity, we don't all agree on the necessity of incentivization in the first place.
"Burn it all down" is easy to say. You can apply it to anything, with no further thought. It's precisely what I'd call "lazy".
To avoid being lazy, you'd have to couple it with exactly what you intend to build from scratch, and ideally how you'd go about it. That's a ton of work, not just because you have to have a concrete idea, but because you have something that people can point out the flaws of. Many of whom will say, "It's terrible, burn it down."
People who diet non stop because they might get to day 20 and it isn't working and the solution is to start over in a week or so.
It is much easier to make yourself think that behavior will change if only one got a clean start. But inevitably you find yourself at a similar point, and a similar result.
In order to start from scratch and make it effective, you should have a reason why things will be different in the future.
There are certainly problems, but you haven't put enough thought into what the statement even _means_ (Would this eliminate EMR systems? Bank transfers? Credit scores?) to consider what "burning it down" means, or "it's not working" means.