&gt; <i>We need to regulate any institution that collects data in the same way.</i><p>I feel like this is too wide. <i>Everyone</i> collects data. I don&#x27;t mean all tech companies collect data, I mean, for example, your friends have copies of the emails you&#x27;ve sent them. They have photos with you in them of places you&#x27;ve been with timestamps and GPS coordinates. Your coworkers have access to your calendar. Your mechanic has the service history on your car. Your librarian knows which books you have checked out.<p>These aren&#x27;t problematic situations because they each only have a little piece of your data, and you trust each those people with that little piece, and if you don&#x27;t then you don&#x27;t have to give it to them.<p>The problem is when you don&#x27;t have that choice. Which is what happens when you&#x27;re dealing with a government or a monopoly (or some other concentrated market where you can&#x27;t trust any of the players). You can&#x27;t reasonably choose to not have your location collected by your mobile carrier, or the traffic cameras in front of your home. If all your friends use Facebook, then Facebook Facebook Facebook.<p>But we don&#x27;t really want to regulate Facebook. I mean holy cow, what is that even supposed to look like?<p>I think we can separate the problem into two pieces. The first is collection by, let&#x27;s call it, unavoidable monopolies. Telecommunications carriers and other utility companies. This is where we know exactly what to do, because these entities should not be collecting any information about people at all. There is no reason Verizon needs to know anything about you other than whether you&#x27;ve paid your bill. So regulation here can be useful, e.g. make it unlawful for carriers to triangulate a cellphone&#x27;s location without a warrant, or collect anything whatsoever about the contents of IP packets. But we also have a strong technical solution here. Encrypt all the things. Fully deprecate HTTP in favor of HTTPS. We need to build, for example, DNS query privacy. Things like that.<p>The other part of the problem is what you might call avoidable monopolies. There is no fundamental reason why Facebook has to be as centralized as it is. You have a phone which has all your photos on it and is connected to the internet 24&#x2F;7. Why is there a copy of your photos on Facebook&#x27;s servers? If one of your friends wants to see one of your photos, why are they not getting it directly from you? Then you don&#x27;t have to trust Facebook with a copy of it. So the solution for this half of the problem is, disintermediate the avoidable monopolies.