Privacy first - Cory Doctorow

[justaprogressive]

The internet is embroiled in a vicious polycrisis: child safety, surveillance, discrimination, disinformation, polarization, monopoly, journalism collapse – not only have we failed to agree on what to do about these, there's not even a consensus that all of these are problems.

But in a new whitepaper, my EFF colleagues Corynne McSherry, Mario Trujillo, Cindy Cohn and Thorin Klosowski advance an exciting proposal that slices cleanly through this Gordian knot, which they call "Privacy First":

snip

Here's the "Privacy First" pitch: whatever is going on with all of the problems of the internet, all of these problems are made worse by commercial surveillance.The fact that commercial surveillance hurts so many groups of people in so many ways is terrible, of course, but it's also an amazing opportunity.


Thus far, the individual constituencies for, say, saving the news or protecting kids have not been sufficient to change the way these big platforms work. But when you add up all the groups whose most urgent cause would be significantly improved by comprehensive federal privacy law, vigorously enforced, you get an unstoppable coalition.

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[hunter]

1. Strict privacy laws and enforcement would make it much harder for the bad guys to profit.

In a similar way, comfortable living wages and strict enforcement of labor protections would eliminate the problem of undocumented immigration. There would be no profit in hiring undocumented workers to abuse and dispose of when they are no longer useful.

As it stands now exploiting naive people on the internet is a very profitable business.

[justaprogressive]

2. They would indeed...

Yes we have to stop it from being so profitable.