I’m not happy to see this sort of thing. What can we seriously do to protect our privacy these days, do we even have privacy anymore?
No. We have neither privacy nor even a right to privacy in the USA. The 4th amendment has never provided a comprehensive right to privacy, and it has been eroded beyond recognition by the Supreme Court.
Gen Z are indoctrinated into a world without privacy from a young age - their effects can be searched at any time by school employees and they are videotaped at all times at school. Their friends can look up all their Discord history at https://spy.pet/ Only Gen X / Millenials / other older generations had any privacy in the past.
The 2nd amendment doesn't provide a comprehensive right to carry a fully automatic weapon and yet people fight for their right to carrying a fully automatic weapon. The writers of the Bill of Rights never imagined something like Digital Landscapes when writing the 4th amendment, but they did write about the right of the people to be "secure in their persons" and "against unreasonable searches". It is up to the governed to decide if this encompasses something like Digital Landscapes.
IMO the failure to respect the right to privacy is a quick path to empowering authoritarian, repressive, and tyrannical ideologies.
A better framing might be “we need to enact these rights and then continue to protect them against erosion over time”.
We are free to pass laws establishing a right to privacy from corporations, but I don’t believe the 4th provides any existing protection.
New protections of privacy from corporations are desperately needed in the digital era.
Example: Civil Rights Act of 1964 [1] "Congress asserted its authority to legislate under several different parts of the United States Constitution, principally its enumerated power to regulate interstate commerce under the Commerce Clause of Article I, Section VIII, its duty to guarantee all citizens equal protection of the laws under the Fourteenth Amendment, and its duty to protect voting rights under the Fifteenth Amendment."
After all, Europeans still use Discord/Reddit/etc. Much of the tracking is done by shady third parties with bots, who ignore GDPR. Or via browser extensions, malware, large-scale data theft and dumps, shady VPNs that get advertised heavily on YouTube, third-party tracking cookies, etc.
Wait, what? What exactly does this show you?
We can start by no longer trading privacy for convenience or discounts, and by no longer doing business with companies that do this sort of thing. In this case, by no longer buying anything from Walmart.
The only way we can get things back to a more sane place is a combination of legislation and customer rejection of these sorts of practices.
> do we even have privacy anymore?
We can (not 100%, but to a meaningful degree. 100% privacy has never been a thing), yes, by no longer voluntarily giving it up. But that also means giving up a lot of convenience (that also never existed until relatively recently). The choice is ours.
One of the problems I see with this is that they don’t have a measurable way to know how many people choose not to buy from them or visit their stores due to these practices, there should be a way to say: “you lost a sale due to you invading my privacy”. I personally haven’t been on a WalMars, target, walgreens or any large retailer in years.
I avoid doing business with companies that abuse their customers because I want to avoid being abused, not so much to get them to become less abusive (but if it encourages them to do that, then gravy).
We can have a meaningful amount of privacy right now. We just can't have it without giving up a some optional conveniences.
I'm not fully up to speed with politics in California or many of the states, but I wonder if there are groups working to create citizen driven legislation around consumer and privacy protections.
Not doing anything is basically accepting it.