Exactly. Retrospective laws like that would face stiff opposition.
For one, you can typically opt out of the latter, but not the former.
>All my university systems run on Microsoft. All my future employers' systems will probably run on Microsoft. All public transport in my country effectively requires an app which is tied to either Google or Apple operating systems to buy tickets. Schools require students as young as 6 years old to have an iPad or chromebook tied to Google or Apple.
>There is no real choice in our modern society to "not give your personal data" to these megacorps.
You'd have to be homeless, unemployed, unbanked and practically a hermit to even approach "opting out" from this private law. That's not a real choice.
How many people have gmail addresses? Use Google products, such as Google's VOIP service? How many cars, or home(now) come with such products built in?
I guess what I'm getting at is, even if you do your best to purge yourself, and even if you try to purge the government, you're still left dealing with people, and if you email them at gmail, then Google still gets the entire conversation.
And if we somehow manage to create at "Don't store this" situation, will it be like when the Canadian government passed a law, forcing Google, Facebook, etc to pay for linking to stories? Just as Australia did?
They're effectively dropped all Canadian news sources.
So, would they "drop" users who have requested no data storage? That is, you cannot email anyone at gmail? It goes into a dead hole?
I suspect that freemium, as a business model, is going to be completely incompatible with democracy.
What would make it an ex post facto law is if companies were punished for how they handled data before the law was created. It is perfectly reasonable to punish them if they continue that same behavior after the law was created.
Some poor kid would have to go and load all the tapes and redact it.
Also, it is morally different when you want to punish lawmakers.
It is voluntarily ridiculously extreme, because the parent comment was itself ridiculously categorical.
The thing is: most of the time, retro-active laws are dangerous tools that should be used rarely and with caution, but sometimes and when some people have been doing something that they knew was evil even though not technically illegal, it can make sense to punish them with laws designed after the fact.
Especially evident in programming. E.g. "premature optimization is the root of all evil".
Knuth said: "Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%."