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Comment by josh_today | Hacker News Reader

Corporations’ digital rights are protected more than the individual. We need a digital bill of rights.

I've seen that call quite frequently in the past couple of years. Such as in a Guardian article [1], and from groups such as Neeva [2] - worth checking its "about" section [3] to see its backers etc.

Also, I think, worth taking the sort of sceptical stance expressed in a Wired article [4] from 2019, What’s a Digital Bill of Rights Without Enforcement?, which points out that some players ostensibly backing digital rights are possibly wolves in sheep's clothing.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/28/americ...

[2] https://neeva.com/digital-bill-of-rights

[3] https://neeva.com/about

[4] https://www.wired.com/story/whats-digital-bill-rights-withou...

This is indeed urgently needed, many of our fundamental rights laws predate the internet and are outdated. Poland plans to introduce a law in that regard, although it only covers social media accounts and comments if I remember correctly.

> We need a digital bill of rights.

What would be in such a digital bill of rights? (This is a bit vague for me to understand what you're necessarily advocating for)

Ownership of your data.

Your social graph should be yours.

Your photos should be yours

And recently, your health should be yours

The main pillars of a digital bill of rights would be the freedom to choose and portability.

> your health should be yours

There are limits to each of these. If you are suggesting that your vaccination status is yours alone to share, quite a few people will disagree with you, and for good reason. Even the bill of rights we do have has its limits when your rights encroach on the rights of others.

Vaccination status has nothing to do with digitization or Social Media it's an issue of public health. It's a more complicated question for the law and health authorities, not really an issue of privacy between you and Amazon or Twitter.

Meaning your health data, not just vaccination status.

Due to regulations patients’ health data is very much still kept on paper or by individual doctors. Eventually we’ll have a single source- who gets to own that?

Quite a lot of this is in the GDPR: The right of [access,rectification,erasure,restricted processing,data portability] for personal data.

Personal data is defined as any information related to an identified or identifiable natural person, i.e. much wider than your identity. photos, health and probably also social graph fall under it.

Do you remember the outcry from HN when GDPR was announced and then later launched?

It was hard to understand just how much of it was pure hate for what the law represented or just people realizing that GDPR will affect their bottom line.

I think more people complain about the implementation of the GDPR rather than its aims and philosophy. Those cookie popups for example are an absolute UX plague, anyone who'd heard the words "alarm fatigue" and vaguely comprehended what it meant could have told them it was a rubbish idea that papers over a yawning chasm. All that particular part of it achieved was making the Web worse.

I block them all, and I've heard the British government is getting shot of them soon. They will not be missed.

The cookie popups are not part of GDPR, but a separate law (ePrivacy Directive)

And they're only required for cookies not essential to providing the service.

Things like right to privacy, the right to not be arbitrarily excluded from services esp. for things like political views, the 'right to be forgotten', transparency in terms of information sharing, clarity in billing, the right to delete accounts permanently, etc. etc..

I think such a thing is actually more important than the monopolizing issues of the FAANGS. Breaking them up might be a little nice, but as individuals we're beholden to the incredible gatekeeping of industry.

I don't think there's anything special about being digital on this.

If a newspaper didn't want to publish your letter to the editor, they aren't forced to

And if a phone company doesn't want to carry your calls, or a bank give you an account?

Or if the largest ink and paper manufacturers collude to deny your newspaper the resources needed for printing? If the delivery unions refuse to deliver your newspaper?

You're right, it's not the being digital that's special about this.

Banks absolutely decline to give people accounts. If they find out you’re a sex worker, your account will immediately go poof. Hell, quite a few will kick you out the door if they see cryptocurrency transactions. Bounce a couple checks? You’ll wind up on an industry-wide blacklist via ChexSystems.

That they do it doesn't make it right, or not dangerous to free societies.

Isn't forcing a business to do business with someone dangerous to a free society? I've had toxic clients in the past; I shouldn't have been allowed to discontinue the relationship?

It depends on the position of the business. If you get put on an industry-wide blacklist and can't open a bank account forever, that's really going to damage your life prospects; nobody should be able to do that to you without due process of law. Especially, no single person should be able to do it.

As long as you understand the risks of marginalizing people who live in the same society, it's "fine".

Just have to accept that once in a while one of them will do something bad and the majority will vote to further restrict your and their own freedoms in hopes of better security, not realizing it wasn't a security issue in the first place.

> "Isn't forcing a business to do business with someone dangerous to a free society?"

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibits discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing based on race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status, and disability. Are you saying the FHA is "dangerous to a free society" as others in that era did to try to overturn it? I certainly hope not.

It's sad to see a new generation of people unwittingly repeating old, discredited arguments once made by bigots.

As with any scenario, there are exceptions or edge cases, and you've highlighted some, and you've also highlighted that we've addressed it (more than 50 years ago!) via legislative fixes.

I'm a fan of the FHA and its follow-ups. I'm also a fan of being able to decline to build a website for, say, the KKK.

Do they kick them out of a commercial account or a personal account or both?

I’m curious. I can see them not wanting to provide assistance to an illegal business, but what the reasoning behind denying a personal account?

Only tangentially related, but try getting a UK or US bank account as a gambling company. Doable, yes. Easy, no. Low-effort, not a chance. And you still risk getting kicked out for no reason at all.

Banks are terrified of gambling companies: they are one of the very few businesses where it is perfectly normal for a notable fraction of downstream customers to withdraw more money than they put in. Without ever having delivered any goods or billable services(!)

Is it any wonder online gambling has been such a magnet for money laundering?

There are plenty of legal businesses that banks and payment processors refuse to do business with. Take a look at the long lists of businesses Stripe won't process payments for[1].

[1] https://stripe.com/restricted-businesses

I feel like one of those three is a much more reasonable reason than the others

So do most people, but there's wide disagreement on which one.

> Or if the largest ink and paper manufacturers collude to deny your newspaper the resources needed for printing?

This actually happened here in Argentina; Papel Prensa is the only newsprint company, so if they don't want to sell you newsprint, you aren't going to print a newspaper.

Right but the one that did publish your letter wasn’t hounded by a indignant mob and advocating for the ink companies and the paper companies to not sell to them nor were the paperboys hounded as the scum of the earth.

Are you sure about that? :-))

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