Senate takes another stab at privacy law with proposed COPRA bill
Once again we continue to look at data privacy and identity theft in the wrong way in my opinion. To me the solution is very simple. If you are reselling my data, allowing access to my data, or deriving data &#x2F; servives from my data that identifies me in any way and then selling that to a third party for a profit or giving it to them as part of a license so that they can generate profit from it (including ad targeting or analytics) then when I visit your site or use your service there should be a big box in simple to understand English, not legalese or a lengthy EULA, that says &quot;we [do one of the things listed above], are you ok with that?&quot; If I say &quot;no&quot;, then you cannot descriminate against me and you cannot do those things. You still have to let me use your site or service; you still have to provide me with identical services; etc. You can still show me ads (non-personalized), charge me a bit more money commensurate with the value of my data, or introduce a different monetization method, but you can&#x27;t deny me service all together.<p>Further, if you collect my data, YOU are liable for it. Breaches should not be the user&#x27;s problem. Meaning, if someone walks off with the contents of your database containing my PII using anything less than a crazy number of zero days, you are liable for a set financial penalty per user&#x27;s info lost (in the way HIPAA does it) and &#x2F; or you are liable in perpetuity for protecting against identity theft with an insurance policy. I don&#x27;t need to prove attribution. If I ever have a problem that could plausibly be linked back to the data exposure, you are liable for damages.<p>Finally, it should not be the user&#x27;s problem to clean up identity theft, ever. If a bank opens an account in my name without properly authenticating me, that is the bank&#x27;s problem, not mine. It should be up to them to conclusively prove it was me that did it, not up to me to prove that I didn&#x27;t. Does this mean it will be more complicated to open up various accounts and credit? Yes. Does it mean that there will be lost business for these institutions? Yup. Tough luck; that is the price we have to pay.<p>The entire point of this should be to heavily disincentivize collection of PII unless absolutely necessary for core business function.