How about passing a law explicitly covering the kind of information being collected and sold as actually being private, and against the law to share with anyone without a warrant?
Except that it's not how EULA do work. If it's made illegal by law (which GP suggess), then lawyers writing these EULAs can write anything they want in fineprint: it's not superseding the law.
I think it's perfectly fine to make ‐reselling‐ of personal data blanket illegal. Since it's my data, I might have consented to giving the data to someone for some purpose. However, they absolutely have no implied consent that they can sell that data to someone else, no matter what their EULA says. If they want to sell it, then I need to get a dividend of that sale revenue, since it's my data.
This is not a physical good that's changing owners. It will always be irrevocably linked to /me/. That's what makes it valuable. So the owner of that data will forever and always be me, no matter who "bought" it. Exactly the same way that buying a digital game does not make me an owner of that copy, but merely the owner of a perpetual-yet-revokable license to play the game on my sanctioned console.
...but that's not the same you might say. That's right, but how do you put that into law? You need actual rules, "don't be evil" is not enough. There are hundreds of cases where sharing personal data is "right" and expected, and hundreds of cases where it is "wrong". You want to allow the "right" usage and ban the "wrong" usage. And then you have lobbies trying to explain why they are on the right side and their opponents are on the wrong side, and then you will have lawyers who are really good at finding loopholes, and in the end, what you get is something like GDPR with all its complexities. You can't really escape it.
You're making an "it's all so complicated" argument, but not pointing out any actual occasion in which it might be complicated.
> There are hundreds of cases where sharing personal data is "right" and expected, and hundreds of cases where it is "wrong".
This is as close to a direct citation of the law of averages that I've seen in a long time.
> And then you have lobbies trying to explain why they are on the right side and their opponents are on the wrong side,
"Everybody is going to complain anyway..."
> lawyers who are really good at finding loopholes
The problem is lobbyists that are very good at adding loopholes.
> in the end, what you get is something like GDPR with all its complexities. You can't really escape it.
When you want to pass a law limiting what companies can do with data without the user's consent, but don't really want to limit what companies are doing in any way, you end up with weird, baroque definitions of data and consent.
If you're never willing to risk profits, or to make certain businesses completely unsustainable, then every regulation must come accompanied with either a trivial method for large enough companies to ignore it, or must be paired with a completely unrelated regulatory giveaway.
Them following the law is entirely downstream from Congress doing things like what Wyden is doing. Their existence is predicated on congressional satisfaction, and many congresspeople are at least fellow travellers to the practical frustrations many people on this site have with the NSA. It's never enough, but it's _something_.
Meanwhile plenty of countries just have their intelligence services tucked away, out of the spotlight, and with barely any legal framework to bind them.
The director of the NSA outright lied to congress while under oath and has faced zero consequences for it. There is zero meaningful oversight in the US and congress is absolutely powerless to do anything but bitch and moan about it publicly just like the rest of the American people. That was what drove Snowden to finally leak what he knew. He saw that congress had no means of knowing what was happening and therefore they couldn't do anything to stop it.
Not even the president can do anything about the NSA. Obama campaigned on ending the mass surveillance of the American people. Presidential candidates tell a lot of lies while trying to get elected, and Obama was an effective orator, but he was also a civil rights attorney and taught constitutional law. I believed he meant what he was saying when he said that the NSA was ignoring the law whenever it was convent for them, and that he would oppose any bill that included retroactive immunity for telecom companies that were handing over American's data to the NSA illegally.
Of course, once he got into office everything changed and he very quickly spoke out in favor in the NSA, he vastly expanded their powers to spy on Americans, and he granted immunity to those same telecom companies. I figure that means that once he was elected the NSA showed Obama some super secret information that convinced him that violating the constitution was necessary or perhaps he was shown exactly how much dirt they had on him and his family and he was threatened to fall in line.
Either way, it doesn't appear that anyone at any level of government can oppose the NSA in a meaningful way.
And maybe they break the law and keep getting away with it. But this doesn’t mean that’s how they are meant to work.
There is nothing more morally corrosive than a law enforcement agency betraying the trust represented by their powers.
In the most technical sense it's legal though of course it subverts the entire idea of the justice system by having a court in your pocket.
[1] https://www.vox.com/2015/5/7/8567089/nsa-patriot-act-ruling
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-b...
The government doesn't want intelligence agencies reined in by anything but American interests. They want those agencies to be free do commit whatever evil is deemed necessary to further those interests, laws and Constitution be damned. The NSA is still spying on everyone. The CIA still runs torture camps around the world. Nothing changes. Snowden didn't change anything. Assange didn't change anything. Wyden isn't going to change anything.
The ability of the American people to hold their government to account in any meaningful way is a facade. Americans live under the oligarchy of corporations and the military industrial complex, not any kind of functional democracy. The American people, despite their guns and breathless evocations of the Founding Fathers, are not in control.
Although that statement is just an oversimplification of the situation. The government should follow domestic law even if it breaks foreign law by design.
The US constitution in particular aims to protect the people from government overreach. See the original amendments and read them in that light.