The case of insurance providers having a microscope into everyone's lives is simply dystopian. As with political campaigns, potential employers, law enforcement, and so on.
To be fair to Kaiser, that really isn't their problem.
You should be griping to the telco (yes, I know it's a waste of time) and your politicians (marginally more useful than the former), because that is their problem.
Also, source that call records are sold? I thought even the government (non federal security apparatus) needed a warrant to get access to that information?
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013...
Therefore, I am confused whether or not a warrant is needed. If the phone networks were straight up selling call records, then surely no law enforcement agency would bother with warrants.
That said I would be completely unsurprised if they were used for 'parallel discovery' purposes.
Communications: warrant.
Metadata: it depends.
(Not a general rule but a useful heuristic).
* There are limited carve-outs for medical records and such.
Yes. I think what's being alluded to is that the ultimate problem lies there, and carving out special systems and cases to legislate to avoid bad behavior that might results from that will always fall short of what we could get with some more overarching legislation that makes it so the end person retains at least enough rights about that data to know when it's happening and preferably be able to stop it and requiring very stringent rules about those that do attempt it with permission from end users.
At that point it's no longer about finding which if the data aggregators are doing unsavory things with the data they get from you and trying to find some way to get them to stop and it's then about any data broker that wants your information trying to get you to allow it (because there are undoubtedly cases where the data is good for society and even good for you) needs to justify what and why and how they use it.
Edit: And there would be legal recourse if they don't follow those legal standards, of course. It's implied, but might as well be stated outright.
Perhaps there should also be a nonprofit clearinghouse like a "credit agency" that provides a centralized portal for reviewing all of the permission links at and between businesses, and also a central point for changing phone numbers, email, shipping, mailing address, etc.
Then the carved out allowances for specific companies or industries are clear and their need can always be weighed against our rights, making them much easier to pull back, because it's obvious when it comes to our rights and the needs of an industry to continue making money, our rights come first. If it's approached from a non-rights angle at some point we are attempting to curtail an industry, I think that might be a much more contentious discussion.
If we can't get rights, I wouldn't mind HIPAA being expanded into an overall PII protection system with two or more levels, one being current HIPAA health info, and the other main one being all other PII info and that allows a company to collect it for internal use without lots of constraints (depending on info, and purely so it doesn't accidentally tank existing industries that aren't problematic because all of a sudden they can't store some benign info they need that the law accidentally targets) but once they want to share it at all they need to adopt a much more stringent framework like medical info requires for tracking and accounting of it, which would probably weed out the vast majority of random "collect the PII and sell it because it's cheap" stuff that goes on, since it's no longer low cost at all given the requirements that would exist around it (including authorization to share). Just the cost structure around strict legal and storage compliance and requiring authorization and tracking of all sharing of information would disincentivize a huge amount of the abuse we see.
Plus the individuals found responsible thrown into prison, and personally bankrupted.
Plus a punitive hit to the stockholders, including clawbacks of past realized gains, to align incentives better with productive society, and not let a corporation be a shield for routine criminal conspiracy.
Working backwards from the desired state, what legislation do we need?
Not much for the jackboot police state you look to create