rt4mn

For this kind of regulation, you look to see what kinds of enforcement mechanisms exist. You need either (or ideally, both):

- a private right of action (IE, I get to sue you if you violate the privacy rights that this bill spells out)

- well funded and dedicated "white colar" unit under the attorneys general that has authority to investigate and punish wrongdoing

Getting the government to spend a whoooooole bunch of money on a dedicated white collar enforcement unit is generally not very popular, and while a private right of action is generally cheaper for the state, its also really unpopular with industry types who hate getting sued by jo jack and jane.

The EFF has a great rundown of what makes a good privacy bill here: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/tech-lobbyists-are-pus...

IAPP (which hosts this tracker) is ironically not as strong on privacy issues as the EFF is so I'm kind of glad they are not including a "effective" column, to be honest.

> Well, guess what? We have now all been granted a power once reserved for totalitarian governments. A not particularly industrious fourteen-year-old can learn more about a person in a shorter amount of time than a team of K.G.B. agents could have done sixty years ago.

I feel like this is an aspect of privacy that is not discussed often enough. Its a discussion that should have happened in (the year) 1984 when the terminator came out, and Arnold killed a bunch of people by looking them up in the yellow pages. Everyone having increasingly easy access to the tools necessary to perform these kinds of "OSINT investigations" into nearly anybody is not good for society.

Just because something can be technically done does not mean that we cant impose restrictions that make it to costly to use except in the most constrained and extreme circumstances.

This is an oversimplification of a complicated story, but a great example is when the NSA stopped doing mass phone / text analysis because of the additional regulatory burdens imposed by the USA Freedom Act. The NSA contends that the data is still useful, but also that the difficulties of complying with the law make it not worth it.