America should borrow from Europe’s data-privacy law
Given the expense and difficulties of complying with these rules and enforcing them, we should seriously consider the opposite approach of radical transparency.<p>As the ability to collect and process data becomes cheaper and easier to deploy, it seems to me that trying to preserve an assumption of universal privacy and anonymity trying to swim up a waterfall.  Cameras are becoming so cheap they&#x27;re practically disposable.  Facial recognition software and the big data tools to manage all this data are also becoming more widely available.  Are we going to legislate against all that?  It&#x27;s one thing to monitor high profile corporations like Google and Facebook, but if surveillance is cheap enough, how do you make sure that <i>no one</i> is amassing reams of private information?<p>The worst case scenario is that while corporations and criminal organizations continue to discretely gather private data, the rich and powerful will be able to afford the cost of privacy but the rest of us won&#x27;t have a grasp on who knows what about us.<p>The alternative to working against the tools that technology affords us is to work with them.  In some cases this means embracing radical transparency.  We define a narrow range of places that really are private, and assume that anything that happens outside of those spaces is public.  For example, what happens inside of one&#x27;s bedroom is private, but what happens outside of one&#x27;s front door is public.  This information wouldn&#x27;t be available only to the powerful or well-connected, it should be available to everyone.  In particular, society should keep a close eye on the richest and most powerful people.  Not necessarily on their private lives, but certainly on their finances.<p>I&#x27;m not arguing that we should give up all privacy.  Encryption works and is difficult to defeat, so we should default to encrypting all interpersonal communication.  We don&#x27;t need to give up privacy, but we do need to prioritize what aspects of our lives should remain the most private.  I do think that if that we&#x27;re going to expect twentieth century notions of privacy and anonymity with twenty-first century technology, we&#x27;re going to have a very hard time of it.