Rattle wrote:
] Here is a question for the MemeStreams community.. If you
] were proposing legislation for laws governing how venues can
] collect and user information from IDs, what would you propose?

Damn, Rattle, why don't you ask a complex question. A few thoughts:

1. Most pro privacy people are libertarians, and so they generally shy away from government regulation. This has resulted in the situation we have today online, which is that entities must disclose what they do with your data, and you get to make choices. This is good in the sense that entities have been more conservative with what they do because its visible and consumers have been able to apply market pressure to reign things in.

Should the government force me to be private even if I don't want to be? I don't think so. The government should create a framework in which we can make choices.

2. The best analogy I've heard here is to copyright. There are a great deal of very strict rules about what an individual can do with commercial information. On the other hand, the rules about what a commercial entity can do with a individual's personal information are very liberal. Looking at the situation in this light is illustrative of whose interests are upheld.

The relationship is direct. Congress approved "no judge" subpoenas that the RIAA can use to obtain your personal information in order to protect their copyrights.

Furthermore, when lack of privacy causes problems, like spam, watching the government react is a lot like watching paint dry.

The system is not responding to your interests.

One of the worst offenders, of course, is the government itself. They create all these IDs. Furthermore, they usually sell the databases to all comers. In Texas you can get the DMV database on CD-ROM. Someone took it and setup a website where you could search it. People got pissed. So Texas passed a law making websites like that illegal. They still sell the CDs and the website has moved offshore. Talk about missing the point.

We ought to curtain the data the government shares.

3. The most important thing that we need is awareness and sophistication about this issue with the general populace. Levels of understanding have improved a great deal in the last 20 years, but there is still a lot of road to cover.

There is no reason why Google can't discard the last two octets of your IP address. It will not impact their demographics at all, but it would provide enough protection against turning their database into a thought crime monitor. And they'll do it, but only if we demand it.

RE: Wired News: Great Taste, Less Privacy