General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Don't entertain this garbage. [View all]Ms. Toad
(34,069 posts)since I am an attorney, part of my field is internet law & privacy, and I actually write some of those agreements, I think I have a pretty good idea of what they say. And I also review questions they have about whether what they want to do falls within the limits of the agreement. But for the most part, since screw-ups are very expensive and my job during the day is to protect my client, the short version of most agreements I write is, "You have no privacy, get over it." And you are right that many people don't read them - that is also their choice. What is not OK is for us to be deprived of the ability to make that choice - or of the right for redress in court. When my clients screw up, you can haul them into court. When the ACLU sued on behalf of people whose data we now know was being captured, the Supreme Court said they had no standing to sue because it was pure speculation that their data was being captured, and they hold all of the data and cannot be compelled to produce it or even acknowledge it exists (private companies can be).
There are far fewer people who write their congresspeople about anything than there should be, but I'm also on the governing body of a faith based lobby group - which lobbied against the Patriot Act when it was first introduced - and pretty much continuously since then: http://fcnl.org/search/?q=patriot%20act (and that narrows your choice of who I am to ~200 people - or perhaps 100 . . . as long as I'm not using a misleading title and combining the first paragraph it probably narrows the field to no more than a dozen, and perhaps only one. I haven't actually checked).
But - back to the topic - there are people who care deeply about these issues who do lobby (and have since 9/11), do write their congresspeople, who do develop personal relationships with them to try to restore governmental respect for privacy and civil liberties.