Every piece of data collected should be an opt-in both for the initial collection and any sharing to a third party. There should be an explanation for why it is collected and an explanation for what features are not possible if it is not collected. It should be a violation of the law to disable a feature based on failure to opt-in for data points that aren't absolutely necessary for the operation of that feature.
The problem is that the government often requires the providers/counter-parties to collect the data, so that a regulator can check for systemic discrimination.
What would happen if you just lied? I guess you wouldn't get healthcare coverage once they found out? But isn't there something in law about material damages, they'd have to prove you cost them money by choosing the wrong race?
If it's an official government form, there's usually verbiage stating that knowingly and willingly falsifying information is considered perjury or some such wording.
Where is the official government backed race classification list? If you look at the options they don't even know what they mean by "race". There are options asking if you are hispanic, which my definition of the meaning takes the Spanish speaker form, what about french or german speakers why are they discriminated against? And surely when they list colors they can't be talking about people. I don't know what white race is, or black as I have never seen people of either of those colors, unless and except if they mean for hair color, shades of brown and peach maybe then okay. Then they add some regions and a couple countries, by why are so many left out if thats what they mean by race? I would really prefer they gave a proper taxonomy here, until that happens they can not say that whatever you entered is lying or wrong.
My point being, Where is the complete taxonomy? The argument I have parsed from links, with the absents of context or words, is not about race, it's about if a person is Native to the Americas. Wait, no it's not because many Mexicans are natives but not that kind of native. So which native american? Hope you are seeing the argument that can be made if someone actual whats to spend the time and money arguing it.
They still don't define Native in a context with any other definitions of "race". Just because people want to "cancel" others for identity labels it doesn't make a race, which is what I am asking for. A proper and complete taxonomy, until then they can not prove one was lying -- only out spend in lawyer fees to make it not worth fighting. Which is outside the point of: what is lying.
Sure, but that's getting too far into it. Not that you're wrong though. The point was, the people that make the thing never/rarely get punished, but it is the individuals that get the hammer. If websites get fined for running the evilCorp SDKs, then the problem would be more effectively solved by going after evilCorp for providing the SDK. If there was no SDK nor reward for using it, the websites being fined would not have needed to be fined. Trying to scare people into not doing something is much less effective
I wouldn't be surprised if both are illegal. But these days, the correlation between "X is illegal" and "larger org's do not do X" just ain't what it yousta be.
My understanding is that it's legal with opt-in, but the opt-in is allowed to be confusing, opaque, and sticky, so most people "consent" without informed consideration. We really need to revisit contract law in a modern context. Call me crazy but I don't think it's reasonable that our society operates in such a way that easily 90+% of people are subject to contract terms they signed but don't know or understand.
Damn near anything in business in the US is allowed with "opt in" where the opt in is literally the scene from Charlie and the Chocolate factory, including the part where you don't get to come after the factory for your death and dismemberment as stated in 1pt font after an entire chapter of reading to dull your attention.
On top of the GDPR/American concept of "it is all OK if there is consent" which applies to most organization, health related organizations face stronger HIPPA regulations in the US.
Most long contracts are a reaction to 'failure to warn' lawsuits where plaintiffs (successfully) argued that they should have been notified of something. The problem is that when you add up all those 'somethings', you get absurdly long documents.
Well the tech companies/offense contractors are probably using it to enrich the department of wars efforts. Hmm I wonder what they want race and citizenship data for? Ohhh... Oh...
Why would politicians ever pass such a law? Who do you think they work for?
update: Yeah, my bad. The point of this comment was to express my increasing cynicism at how we just keep seeing this kind of corporate behavior over and over again and how even when a tiny win is achieved on things like data collection, right to repair, ease for cancelling subscriptions, privacy, and so on and so on, they are so quickly over taken by new tactics or clawbacks/loopholes/non-enforcement of those laws.
HN comments was probably the wrong place to vent and its too late to delete it.
Very rarely. Most of the consumer protection laws were passed before Reagan in 1980. We did get the CFPB after the 2008 financial meltdown but it's been under attack ever since.
So it should be as easy as buying tracking data and searching for Congressmen. We can put up license plate readers around Washington too, since that's legal.
Doesn’t really seem like the environment where the common persons going to get more rights or protections since the POTUS and SCOTUS are currently ripping those up while Congress sits in the cuck chair.
"Citizens" United (which allows unlimited corporate political donations by classifying them as "speech", for those out of the loop) has fundamentally changed the core incentive structures of the modern political landscape. To compare a pre-CU world to a post-CU world when it comes to matters at the intersection of corporate interests and government regulatory / legislative power is comparing apples to oranges.
We need to overturn CU if we want to be able to go back to a world where government serves people rather than multinational conglomerates.
Citizens United has to be the most inaccurately cited case. It did not 'allow unlimited corporate political donations by classifying them as "speech"'.
It ruled that the federal government was wrong to restrict the speech rights of some groups while allowing other very similar groups to still retain their rights. One of the major examples of this was the media industry. A for-profit newspaper company could spend whatever amount of money it wanted to on political speech. An identical company in a different field could not. This, the court ruled, was unconstitutional.
It also did not grant corporations personhood, the other thing people like to state that it did.
Frankly, I think it's much less of an issue than it's made out to be. If money meant so much, Donald Trump wouldn't have beat Jeb Bush on the way to beating Hilary Clinton.
To me, money in politics is the red herring to keep you from looking at the real election reform that needs to happen, some combination of open primaries (to remove the effect of primaries going to more extreme candidates rather than centrists) and an alternative to first past the post elections to allow people to vote for who they like without worrying about throwing away their votes (there are many different systems to do this, they're all major improvements).
The money in politics is used by the parties to back their preferred candidates and the voters go along with it in the general elections because they don't want to waste their votes. The money helps them do the bad thing but it isn't the bad thing.
They work for the people. In some countries, people actually vote for politicians that benefit the population. In other countries, people repeatedly vote for politicians despite knowing that those politicians are only interested in enriching themselves, with a track record going back decades of doing nothing but that. The problem, then, is the voters in certain countries, not the politicians.
Many of those countries have mechanisms by which one can express their preferences earlier in the process, ones which have been successfully used to pivot major political parties in new and unexpected directions, although those mechanisms are more complicated than just showing up at the end and whining about the results, so usually it's only motivated individuals and entities which leverage them.
In some countries a major party has succeeded in convincing a majority of voters to vote against their self interest by leveraging "red meat" topics such as abortion, jesus and guns.
It's possible. Ultimately the voters do make the decision, even if they can be swayed. How realistic it might be, I can't say. We certainly need a lot more engagement with the process. There are far too many people ignoring the primaries and then complaining about their lack of choice in the general.
I don't believe donations or corporate backing had anything to do with Trump, for example, winning. Trump won because he genuinely appeals to the average voting American. American voters are willingly choosing to support these politicians and all of the consequences that entails.
For the president election, maybe, but without corporate backing of the GOP he would have to face an adversarial congress. Or at least, that’s the hope