[edko]

What about banning the postal service from selling customer's data, and funding it some other way?

What about changing the "do not call me register" to a "please call me register" and making do not call me the default, and penalizing those who break the rules?

How about banning all those websites that aggregate and sell personal information from social media and public records?

[pc86]

Why, every time someone suggests a fix to something they see as a problem (regardless of whether it's actually a problem, or even the merit of the solution), is there no shortage of people saying "yeah but what about these unrelated problems?!"

I think everything you suggested is something that should be addressed in one way or another. I think banning the sale of medical data is probably a good thing more often than not. All these things can be true, but responding to a statement about banning the sale of medical data with "yeah well what about the post office?!" seems weird, and perhaps politically motivated.

[Neff]

The phenomenon of responding to a statement with a "well what about {quasi-related|unrelated topic}" is called Whataboutism[1].

I think most people use it because they feel there is a larger systemic cause not being addressed by treating a specific symptom, but it does tend to read as a way to shift conversation away from the topic at hand.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

[thr0wawayf00]

> What about banning the postal service from selling customer's data, and funding it some other way?

If you actually read the article, you'd see that this is in response to the upcoming Roe v. Wade vote and how health app data could be used against citizens in the future.

More broadly though, if we always chose to reject legislation based on the fact that we believe it could go further in some way, nothing would ever get done. It's never good enough for somebody. We're OK with businesses shipping half-baked MVPs but we always expect elegant and complete waterfall legislation from our government.

[RobertRoberts]

The problem is that because this move is partisan it won't be effective accept as political ploy.

[thr0wawayf00]

Well I got bad news, everything that happens in US Federal politics today is partisan. That's not an excuse not to try.

[Johnny555]

What data does the USPS sell other than change of address (which I'm a fan of since it means I rarely have to update my address when I move, the businesses I care about find out from the USPS). I know they scan incoming mail, do they sell any of that information?

[dereg]

I don't know if this constitutes "selling data", but the USPS allows you to run direct mail campaigns on routes and neighborhoods. The USPS provides moderately granular, aggregate data about the route/area, which you can then target. Some of the data includes household income, household size, and age brackets. Insofar that I know, you cannot unsubscribe from this type of mail.

You can see for yourself here: https://eddm.usps.com/eddm/select-routes.htm

[pc86]

I don't know if they're personalized or not but there are ads within the Informed Delivery emails, and it wouldn't surprise me to learn there is at least superficial tracking and/or personalization based on who you're [not] receiving mail from.

[etchalon]

"We can't do anything unless we do everything" is always a weird stance.