But lawmakers can easily set the "rules" of business to establish new privacy guidelines for the 21st century.
So, what should be private information that's worthy of protection? Where are the boundaries? And what rules should be set?
At the very least, government should mandate "transparency in spying." When Facebook, your supermarket, or your credit card company sells information about you, they should be required to tell you exactly what information they sold, and to whom.
Just this simple transparency requirement would solve a lot of these problems.
Business, of course, will scream that they can't afford compliance with such an onerous requirement. Every time they sell the fact that you love dogs but have a cat allergy and buy anti-allergy medications, they'll only make a few cents per sale, but it'll cost them more than that to let you know what part of you and your collective body of information they sold to the allergy medicine manufacturers.
And that may well be true. It will decrease the profitability of companies like Facebook whose primary business model is spy-and-sell, and will incrementally reduce the revenue to medical groups, credit card companies, and websites/ISPs who make money on the side doing spy-and-sell.
But we have a long history in America of saying to business, "If that business model is destructive to our society, you can't do it."
We did it with slavery, we did it with child labor, we're doing it with financially lucrative discriminatory practices from redlining to the race- and gender-pay-gap. Other examples include the minimum wage law, bans on predatory loan practices, and requiring companies not to pollute.
Just because a company can make money doing something doesn't mean it should be legal and/or unregulated.
The internet has, indeed, turned into a "thing" every bit as powerful and profitable as manufacturing once was.
But we had several centuries of trial-and-error experience with regulating industrial manufacturing, from wages to pollution to product safety standards.
It's time to develop real and meaningful standards for the internet economy and to get our personal data under control.
The Founders wrote the Fourth Amendment because they were concerned about an oppressive government that couldn't be fought or changed because it knew everything about us. They never envisioned a day when a few billionaires could do the same, even to the point of using mistruths in a data-targeted way to change an entire government.
We need a serious discussion of privacy: what it is, what the appropriate parameters of it are, and the role of government in protecting our privacy from predatory corporate actors.
And, at the very least, we need a "transparency in corporate spying" law right now.
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