This is simply untenable. Institutions of all kinds have been keeping records connected to individuals for millennia.
Try to run a school when you can’t maintain data on the students.
Try to run a school when you can’t maintain data on the students.
HIPAA is an example of that.
All personal data should be treated with at or near HIPAA levels of security. If I give my personal information to my bank, or google, that's fine for them to look at it, but it's not ok if that information magically lands in the hands of Coca Cola for marketing.
You could build a test: the company should not be able to derive any additional value from 100 fully anonymized interactions with the same person as from 100 interactions with a deanonymized individual. Google obviously fails this test since targeted advertising is much more valuable if you have non-anonymized entities.
The doctor can store my data because it is necessary to provide me with the service, but the doctor shouldn't be able to sell my data, nor correlate it with their other patients' data.
Of course, a doctor will learn from treating me and become a better doctor, so you can't actually enforce this totally in practice. But it's like porn - you know when you see the violation.
If you don't want Google to be able to do anything at all with information you put into their system, easy, don't open an account!
I can agree with some of the other points, Google shouldn't be hoovering up mountains of data, etc. Just have to be careful of extremes. If you enshrine something bad in something as difficult to change as a constitution, you're stuck with it, and all your unintended consequences, potentially forever. You say "you can't actually enforce this totally in practice" but have you ever met a law firm? They would absolutely take the most extreme possible interpretation and milk all of society for billions a year if they can find an appropriate avenue.
This kind of extremism is what derailed some constitutional reforms in South America over the past decade. It started with reasonable center-left people saying some reasonable things, the radical left seized the process and wrote the final draft and faced with a choice between insanity and an unsatisfactory status quo people made the only palatable choice.
All aspects of the commercial transaction should be clear and transparent: I give the grocery store cash, it gives me food. My data shouldn't be taken from me, and nor should I have to consent to my data to be taken from me in order to shop there.
Google can store and serve me my data. It cannot use my data for commercial purposes that do not directly serve me. Nor should it be able to aggregate my interactions in a way that serves to increase its own profit, as this, over time, increases the relative power of the firm.
It does until that mechanism is turned against me, as I have to assume it will be.
If you're to see any ads at all, it is vastly preferable that you see random ads for things that you would never be interested in and that register as pure noise to you. Things you could be convinced to buy, or propaganda that elicits some response (positive or negative) are the worst case to encounter.
The choice should be between X targeted ads or X non-targeted ads. They can still target ads based on the content of the page, no different from how television and print ads worked prior to all of this data collection.
How is that metaphor apt?
They present a false choice where Google is saying "We can do this the easy way or the hard way" and we are forced to choose between bad and worse. There is no reason we should not have a less bad choice: the same amount of ads but non-targeted. We, as customers, should not be held hostage by the massive corporations.
We’re talking about offering users a choice of ad options on a site they’re choosing to visit.
That’s nothing at all like a gangster threatening physical harm.
Acting like YouTube is a service that is not functionally required to use in the modern world is a disingenuous argument at best and intellectually dishonest at worst.
There is so much content that folks end up needing to access for so many valid reasons that is only available on YouTube. Plenty of companies only post troubleshooting explainers on YouTube, as one example. I am not "choosing to visit" YouTube in those cases, I am forced by a third party. And I'm being forced because YouTube has functionally built a monopoly on this type of content.
You might as well be telling someone to "Just buy a helicopter and fly yourself" because they are unhappy with the quality of roads in their city.
YouTube holds an absolutely dominant position in user created content. I have purchased products from many companies who post their troubleshooting video content on YouTube and only on YouTube. In many cases, those videos are literally the only content they provide. They do not provide any textual troubleshooting content.
Telling people "Just don't use YouTube" is a functionally useless piece of advice as they cannot "just not go there."
Also, I'm a paying customer of YouTube, why would I "have not right to set the terms they offer their services by?" Why is it that Google gets dictator-level control over the relationship, especially when they are operating as a monopoly?
We the People absolutely have the power to dictate terms to Google or any other company.
How is this corrupting my preferences or misinforming me?
I’m glad the parent of this thread specified the need for a Constitutional amendment. Anything less would be an obvious intrusion on free speech.
But if the single individual begins using robots to follow me around, it becomes problematic. The issue is in the power of the technology that is deployed. What's less clear is where to draw the line: can the shopkeeper type his notes (yes), but can he fill his store with surveillance cameras that correlate my every entry into his store (this one becomes unreasonable and this is the case for which we need laws).
Just as you can use that set of facts plan and optimize your budget, so should Ralph's be able to use that data to plan and optimize their business.
And they should not be able to sell that data to data brokers, whether is anonymized or tied to individual customers.
Unfortunately these things are never so clean as in the theoretical model. As a monopoly, there are likely many situations where interaction with said monopoly is unavoidable.
Or if your telephone service began messaging with offers for products on what you discussed in your phonecalls?
Yet it's extremism to think Google etc shouldnt be able to do this.
This definitely happens, at least in the UK. With anonymised data.
Halting that would pretty much be the end of public health analysis or real-world work on medication effectiveness/adverse reactions. We do a lot of work with deidenitifed data to find health patterns in populations.
In practice, data is often aggregated and then used to deprive some folks of healthcare, or sold to a pharma company below cost, with the pharma company then turning around and maximizing drug profits, where the drug was developed from the underpriced public data.
Tracing code manually isn’t hard for a seasoned dev. Write it in BASIC if you have to lmao
This is the reason privacy is needed.
> Try to run a school when you can’t maintain data on the students.
Yes, we should try this. Zero-knowledge proofs and other modern technology allows for this. Even the first step of not selling or using student data for commerce is an easy step.
Those who think that we should not try to improve because our privacy is already compromised, should step aside.
Reports they can never again consult when gauging a student’s progress over time?
Say what you will, but at least it’s an ethos!