When was the last time you actually read a privacy policy? Most of the time, clicking “I agree” is just a speed bump to getting onto an app or website. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) wants lawmakers to stop pretending like we do. “Nobody reads the small print,” he said. “You end up giving up far too much data.” Brown’s new bill takes a more radical idea: allowing companies to take our data only when it’s “strictly necessary.”
“It shifts the burden from consumers,” Brown said. It would no longer be on you to read privacy policies to figure out what else is really going on. The reset, Brown said, would also compel companies to figure out business models that don’t depend on surveilling consumers or emphasize collecting only anonymized data.
Nobody reads privacy policies. This senator wants lawmakers to stop pretending we do by Geoffrey A. Fowler at the Washington Post
This in particular stood out for me: ““It shifts the burden from consumers,” Brown said. It would no longer be on you to read privacy policies to figure out what else is really going on. The reset, Brown said, would also compel companies to figure out business models that don’t depend on surveilling consumers or emphasize collecting only anonymized data.”
But then back to reality with this pont “Chances are slim to none that Brown’s proposal, called DATA in shorthand, could pass this year in a Republican-controlled Senate.”
The article goes on to pick up on a lot of the issues that I have been thinking about – the way that technology and business evolved with no checks and balances, the discrepancy between what citizens say and do regarding privacy, and the sheer breadth that any legislation needs to cover. Enforcement is a whole problem in and of itself.
All of this leads me to believe that the privacy may be written as law, but it needs to be enacted in the technology and business model itself. And the only way to do this is to make a more commercially efficient solution that businesses will buy into as they move away from the Facebooks.