Comment by jsrozner
4 days ago
The best solution is a constitutional amendment that actually enshrines a right to privacy. Among other things, the retention, aggregation, correlation of any personal data should be illegal (including for commercial purposes). (Storage on behalf of users in encrypted form could be made OK. Could also be refined to support retention of data of the medical, legal, etc kind with the attendant non-admissibility protections.)
This would fix this issue, it would destroy the surveillance models of Google/Facebook, and it would fix the Flock issue, etc. It would also fix the Roe v Wade issue: women would be able to get abortions in the first couple months of pregnancy without the possibility of harassment, since law enforcement would have no capacity to detect pregnancy until then.
Also, tech won't save us had a podcast on the dynamic pricing topic: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-data-is-changing-a...
Would it? The 1st is a prohibition on the rights of government, not private parties. Would the new amendment apply to the government, or to private sector, or to individuals? In any case, the 1st and the 28th? would continually be butting heads, since the 1st prohibits congress from passing laws that would enforce the 28th (and by extension, the states via the 14th). Would a newspaper be allowed to publish unflattering personal, privacy violating details? Would you be allowed to put up a political flyer alleging the same? I'm not sure an amendment is _the best solution_.
We already have laws that abridge the freedom of speech, so it's not absolute.
What's special about slander that we can have a say "you're not allowed to make defamatory false statements about people," but we couldn't have "you're not allowed to spy on people and sell information about them"?
Granted slander is a civil and not criminal matter, but if I could sue companies for sharing personal information about me that would still be something.
There's nothing in the Constitution as it stands today that prevents us from having strict data privacy laws. No amendment is needed.
> Would the new amendment apply to the government, or to private sector, or to individuals?
It depends on how it's written, but there are no inherent limits here. You can make it do either.
> In any case, the 1st and the 28th? would continually be butting heads, since the 1st prohibits congress from passing laws that would enforce the 28th
Amendments, by definition, amend the constitution, as it was prior to them (meaning with all the previous amendments applied) so a later amendment can always override an older one explicitly, and even if it doesn't do so, the plain intent of the new amendment would likely suffice.
And we even have an explicit example of this in the 21st Amendment repealing the 18th Amendment.
The fun part about amendments you can write that into the amendement and it can say whatever you want. There is no special expceptions, it defines what legal government and persons actions are by definition. The only problem (good thing imo) is it takes 2/3 to approve it which is a mountain of opposition. Complex Amendements suffer immensely from this since they have much more power than laws congress passes. But honestly privacy could probably be ensired easier with a law from congress. It is a right but perhaps starting with a law would actually be easier than an amendment nothing stops the government currently from have laws about privacy if there is an objection the escape hatch could be granted by an amendment
id see a limitation on the government to limit or remove liability for private entities to invade privacy.
private corps could still invade privacy, but they wouldnt be able to shrug the liability from torts related to their bad activity.
eg. the government can not remove liability to any behaviour that breaks the constitution, as thats the government brraking the constitution by deputizing somebody else to break it
I suggest that the new amendment make it illegal for devices to track us.
Cameras, microphones, computers, robots, algorithms, etc would not be able track people. Those are in-animate objects, not people, and shouldn't have any rights, especially the right to intrude on people's privacy.
Individuals would not be able to leverage such devices for power, influence or other selfish raesons.
Only another person, a real human, can watch you in public. Even take notes on you. Like a doctor. Or the employees of a grocery store.
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.
You can have privacy and an institution can collect data.
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.
Yes, mostly, but google shouldn't be able to "look" at it either. No entity should be able to derive a commercial benefit from my data; any commercial value of my own data should accrue entirely to me.
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.
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> This is simply untenable. Institutions of all kinds have been keeping records connected to individuals for millennia.
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.
Teachers sending encrypted report cards home with zero-knowledge proofs attached?
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!
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It's not - GDPR does that and it could even be much stricter still and we'd be fine.
There are a lot of commenters responding to this that appear to be confused about the Constitution and government power in the US.
The federal government has the power to regulate the conduct of private actors and to regulate the activity between private actors. The Civil Rights Act is an obvious example.
Relevant to this discussion, obviously HIPAA regulates how certain private actors must treat the data of other private actors, aka patients.
It's probably confusing because the first ten amendments to the Constitution, known as the Bill of Rights, primarily restrain government power. These were enacted because people believed that the original articles granted the federal government too much power. Amendments alter the existing document. Just like the articles in the original document, an amendment can also authorize government powers.
The 13th amendment is a clear example of an amendment that authorizes government power and restrains the conduct of private citizens. It abolished slavery and gave Congress the power to enforce the prohibition.
An amendment can absolutely be written to establish a right to privacy against other private actors and authorize Congress to enact regulation to enforce that right.
And even if you prefer to view the constitution as primarily setting up restrictions on government power, I think most of us here would agree that the at-scale data collection and surveillance our government performs under the guise of national security is an incredible power that is new and novel enough to warrant a discussion on keeping it in check.
The federal government a) saves everything, b) is constantly trying to attack encryption, c) tries to insert backdoors in hardware, and d) otherwise gives itself the means to spy on citizens and aliens alike. Even though we fight and have won, it’s been pyrrhic. I’m tired of constantly having the battle every time a new generation forgets why privacy is important.
I can’t imagine ways in which an amendment asserting every citizen’s innate ownership over their digital footprint, data sovereignty, etc. could be a misuse of the constitution. “No government shall abridge access to secure and private communication technology. No government shall collect or persist a profile of any citizen except as required to serve justice. No government can compel decryption of private data. Etc…”
This is impossible is you consider the financial sector - any kind of unsecured private lending like mortgages become dead in the water, fraud detection goes out the window, money laundering, etc.
It's not impossible. It just raises risk and thus borrowing rates to compensate. That has a dragging effect on the economy and brings up an important question: Are there rights we're willing to give up for money? For a lot of people, perhaps yourself the answer is yes. For others there's no price on their rights - they're not for sale.
I am not convinced mortgages is a net benefit to the society in any way.
Very few people can afford to pay for homes in all cash up front. Plus, financing a home is usually a great idea, since they tend to be appreciating assets (as long as the interest rate is lower than the rate of appreciation).
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And?
Good points, but there should be partial solutions. For example, you can present data about the consumer in order to decide on the mortgage, but once the transaction is complete, the data should disappear. You need something akin to "the data can be used only for the particular purpose of the transaction at hand, and the data must be wholly necessary for the transaction at hand."
We also know that mortgage lenders use irrelevant---well, scratch that---protected data to make decisions (i.e. discriminatory). Race for example is not supposed to be used in lending decisions.
Fraud detection can probably be solved by other reasonable means. And in any case, if you take the fraud argument to the limit, then you'd end up advocating for constant surveillance to prevent fraud. Equifax, Experian, and Transunion are all horrible companies who do their ostensible job minimally well, while maximizing the exploitation of the data of the people.
This hurts me. I want lenders to have good access to the data that shows I am a high quality borrower. Less access adds risk to the lender which they will respond to by taxing me with a higher interest rate and it benefits scammers and people who don't pay their bills.
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> The best solution is a constitutional amendment that actually enshrines a right to privacy.
This seems like a category error on two fronts. First, the constitution is a law which applies to the government, not to private entities such as stores. The proper way to restrain behavior of private entities is with a regular law. Second, we already have a right to privacy under the US constitution (amendment 9 says that rights not enumerated in the constitution are still valid rights, and amendment 10 says that they are reserved to the people).
Moreover, as others have said, you really don't want to use the constitution as your method of first resort when solving societal problems. It's hard to change (by design), and you don't want to have unintended consequences baked in at that level. Sometimes an amendment is necessary, but that needs to be used very sparingly.
The constitution applies to government, yes. But it's predicated on an enumeration of inalienable human rights that need to be recognized and defended. That's what makes our government different from other instances of government. The enumeration of rights sets the stage for what we value as a society. And privacy is sorely missing from the modern dialog.
I'm sympathetic to the idea that the right to privacy in the digital age is fundamental enough that it needs to be distinguished in our founding documents and elevated to a level on par with the freedom of expression in more than just case law. Most importantly, the government shouldn't be able to spy on citizens either. Right now it does. This has implications for encryption law too.
The point of an amendment is to establish the axioms upon which we evaluate all future laws. From there we can build a legal framework that applies similar ideas to the private sector, as and where appropriate.
You should probably start with an amendment to end citizens united fist. That law is making all of this possible.
Your solution is so efficient and workable that I highly doubt we will ever be able to implement it. Any future has to be something we can arrive at from where we are today, and since your future involves a few large corporations dropping their hands on fistfuls of cash, it's going to be really hard to get to it.
The other framing of this is: how much money are you willing to sell your rights for?
Do humans even get much choice in this though on an individual basis? Even the wealthy among us have plagues of paparazzi following them around invading their privacy. The poor have even less choice it's like either eat (grocery shop) and hand over your data or starve with your rights.
This will make the world much poorer. You might think that's worth it but it's true.
No it won't.
See? I can make unsubstantiated sweeping claims too.
It would also return tech to something only the wealthy can afford, and the poor get scraps.
The advertising model is socialist utopian business model, where everyone gets the same service, for the same cost, with money being no barrier to entry. Kids in Indian slums are watching the same Youtube as Moms watching 105" OLED TVs in the Hampton's. Hell that mom might even be watching that kids video, which Google happily hosts and promotes for them. All for the cost of being shown detergent and car ads.
People take the internet for granted, and treat ads as some invasive species commandeered by mega corps to extract money from the communal nature of the modern web.
The alternative though is not the current internet sans ads, the alternative is paywalls on everything, and only the rich kid having a Google, Meta, Discord, and Reddit account.
Ads suck, but at least make an effort to see the whole picture.
Nothing that person said was about removing ads.
The value of non-targeted ads isn't high enough to support what people are accustomed to getting for free.
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There's plenty of other laws that limit the choices of the poor for their own good. You can't just build a lean-to slum, you can't buy swill milk.
The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) is the educational equivalent to HIPPA.
Well, no, its the law that contains the educational parallel to the privacy and rights of record access parts (but not the rest) of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996.
Aside from the wrong acronym, the privacy and access rights are the central focus of FERPA, but pretty far down the list for HIPAA, despite being what many people think it is centrally about—which is why both “rights” and “privacy” are in the name of FERPA but (despite the joke about the common error in the acronym that “the second P in HIPAA is for Privacy”) neither is in the name of HIPAA.
But that will absolutely never happen, the country is more corrupt than it has ever been and doesn’t care one bit about citizens concerns
It's really hard to say with a straight face that the citizens are not getting precisely the government they [collectively] want.
one only needs to open a history book to see that this country used to be much, much more corrupt. while this country has problems, we are far from the first generation to face them.
Mind being more specific? You have a rapist, demented president who previously failed to coup his way back to power, who has gutted all institutions and is siphoning as much wealth as possible to the pockets of himself and his cronies. You have open financial corruption of the whole administration by industry leaders. You can now literally buy pardons and citizenship. The Supreme Court is a full-on political activist court, and created a whole concept of executive immunity that never existed before, to protect Trump. Every single week is a new scandal by this administration that should be career ending.
Please educate me, when was the country more corrupt?
Cool thought but until violating the said constitution actually has enforceable consequences it’s not more than a paper tiger.
Take for instance the 2nd amendment. It is constantly under siege by government officials, both elected and appointed, as well as an activist judicial. Thankfully the SCOTUS has been somewhat successful in parlaying these incursions but someday the perpetrators will succeed, and I think mainly because there are no consequences for trying.
Just an example and JMHO.
> until violating the said constitution actually has enforceable consequences it’s not more than a paper tiger. [...] Take for instance the 2nd amendment.
That seems like an exceptionally tepid constitutional violation to pick, after the last several years of massively-worse and flagrant violations.
Are you offering it because you think it represents something typical, and current events will prove to be an extreme outlier?
Honestly it is the one that came to mind as I am apparently a victim of fraud.
More seriously though what good is a constitution if it can be violated without repercussions?
You and I do agree on one thing though but I would adjust that to being the last 40 years rather than just several.
> The gun lobby’s interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the work fraud, on the American people by special interest groups that I have seen in my lifetime. The real purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that state armies—the militia—would be maintained for the defense of the state. The very language of the Second Amendment refutes any argument that it was intended to guarantee every citizen an unfettered right to any kind of weapon he or she desires.
Sounds like you have been a victim of fraud. At least according to a former Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court. To prevent more people falling prey to fraudsters, Justice Stevens recommends that this amendment should be repealed - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/opinion/john-paul-stevens...
> "Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court. To prevent more people falling prey to fraudsters, Justice Stevens recommends that this amendment should be repealed"
I think you might be missing a sentence or a citation there, because Stevens was an associate justice, never the chief on SCOTUS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Paul_Stevens
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Amen, I've ranted on HN about that a few times. [0] There is zero question that the Second Amendment was created as limit on the federal government interfering with individual states, and did not bar any state from whatever policy they chose for themselves. (Also, at that time, every state was already mandated by mutual treaty to have a "well-regulated militia" with state-appointed officers and state-funding, so the term had existing meaning.)
Whether that narrow scope is/should-be still true is trickier given the 14th amendments, although I believe it was wrongly included in the incorporation doctrine. [1]
[0] I know Google-search scoped to HN used to find them, and today it doesn't. The enshittification continues, is it time for me to start slowly scraping my own comment-history?
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/incorporation_doctrine
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Once people manage to bypass the 2nd Amendment, the next one to go will be free speech.
I know. I’m willing to bet the first thing they’d do after seizing the guns would be to stop unfriendly media from first hand reporting of events in the White House.
Then, when they know they’re proof against an armed citizenry, they’ll start running government policy as a way to line their own pockets. Why, it wouldn’t surprise me if a sufficiently emboldened crook, safe in the knowledge, that you personally cannot stop them by armed force, started to flout the laws left and right.
Put it another way. I never fail to be amazed by the fantasies that govern significant chunks of American thought. People who’ve lived there, and also in other places are able to figure out pretty quickly where they’re actually safer, and more respected by their government, and able to live a decent wholesome life.
I’ll note in passing that there are other countries with similar levels of gun ownership but less suicide and violence. Perhaps the first is because they have slightly more left leaning social policies. I’m all but convinced that the second is because they aren’t driven to a frenzy of terror by their local media. Maybe that cat has escaped its bag and isn’t ever going back. A shame. To live one’s life in fear of angry frightened people with guns sounds awful to me.
Last thing. I’ve had guns pointed at me twice. Once by an infant British soldier in 1990s Belfast. And once by a robbing bastard in a very wealthy part of Los Angeles. Neither was fun, but at least the soldier was predictable in the then prevailing circumstances
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Seems like the first amendment has been bypassed for quite a while now. Recall the creation of 'free speech zones' and "first amendment areas". We keep telling ourselves that the Constitution applies everywhere in the US, but that is clearly not true.
Free speech has already gone, but guns have not. In fact, the guns are being used to suppress free speech.
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free speech is abridged without the 2nd amendment being hit.
unless you are suggesting CNN show up at the whitehouse and shoot anyone that gets in their way to asking the president a question
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