[HN Gopher] U.S. lawmakers call for privacy legislation after Re...
___________________________________________________________________
U.S. lawmakers call for privacy legislation after Reuters report on
Amazon
Author : CapitalistCartr
Score : 161 points
Date : 2021-11-22 12:46 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| ancode wrote:
| If only they had the power to actually enact legislation
| maxerickson wrote:
| This sort of cynicism is confusing. Bringing attention to an
| issue is an obvious component of enacting legislation when
| there are many different topics competing for that attention in
| the legislature.
|
| If it was a resolution passed by the full house calling on
| Amazon to be nice guys, well then okay, be as cynical as you
| want about that.
| Aunche wrote:
| >when there are many different topics competing
|
| The number one thing competing from legislature's time is
| creating soundbytes that make them seem tough. So many bills
| are intentionally politically infeasible because people vote
| for politicians based on what they say rather than what they
| accomplish. They don't have any time left to learn about
| areas that they aren't particularly passionate about, so
| they'll just listen to that intelligent-sounding Amazon
| lobbyist has to say about how a bill would destroy a million
| jobs.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Passing bills is another component - quite an important one.
| The federal government currently faces challenges getting
| bills through.
| [deleted]
| ren_engineer wrote:
| > Internal documents reveal how a former aide to Joe Biden helped
| the tech giant build a lobbying juggernaut that has gutted
| legislation
|
| nothing is going to happen, especially considering the complaints
| are related to Alexa recordings. NSA/DOJ love the idea of having
| recording devices they can hack/subpoena whenever they want, they
| are basically opt-in 1984 telescreens. All Amazon has to do is
| remind Congress behind closed doors that they are an extension of
| the surveillance state
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| It's really interesting to see, on the one hand, the claim from
| the former Alexa engineer that they're not doing this and take
| privacy seriously, and on the other hand, the claim that
| they're government surveillance devices.
|
| Because it's possible that they could both be true. The
| engineers take privacy seriously, think they're preserving it
| well, and then the man from the government comes in and PRISMs
| their servers and only he and one other person at the whole
| company knows about it.
|
| But obviously privacy legislation isn't going to fix _that_.
| LogonType10 wrote:
| You know it's a crackpot theory when it's so unfalsifiable as
| to be absurd. You think one person--just one person--can
| manage the data of millions of people, the backups, the
| government requests, the exporting, and the IT
| troubleshooting? That's awfully convenient, and I expect
| you'll never be proven wrong and have to feel dumb for
| believing it.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The rest of the people work for the government, not the
| corporation? All they need is someone inside the company
| whose job it is to keep other people inside the company
| from finding out. It's the same model as police use for
| informants and intelligence services use for espionage.
|
| It's also kind of pointless to talk about how to falsify a
| class of thing we have affirmative evidence is happening.
| When we found out about PRISM, the heads of the companies
| said they didn't know anything about it. So either they
| were lying or their subordinates successfully kept it a
| secret from them.
|
| Moreover, the interesting question isn't whether it's
| happening right now. It's that given we know it can happen,
| how do we prevent it from happening? For example, by using
| software with published source code that runs on your own
| device instead of someone else's.
| LogonType10 wrote:
| >It's also kind of pointless to talk about how to falsify
| a class of thing we have affirmative evidence is
| happening.
|
| Can you elaborate on the logic behind this a bit more and
| perhaps explain how it wouldn't justify McCarthyism as
| well? (e.g. we know that there was a Soviet spy in one
| office, so every office that acts displeasingly is filled
| with Soviet spies)
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Sure.
|
| The problem with McCarthyism is that you're accusing
| people of being spies without any real evidence. They
| are, in all likelihood, innocent people being punished
| for no reason. It becomes a witch hunt and a pretext for
| punishing anyone you don't like but have no _legitimate_
| reason to punish.
|
| By contrast, "spies exist" is a thing that we know is
| true. There have been documented instances. We don't need
| to know that there is there is a spy in a particular
| company at a particular time to know that we should take
| rational countermeasures against them. Encrypt
| everything. Eliminate centralization to avoid a single
| point of compromise for millions of people.
|
| This can't be used for a witch hunt because it's
| defensive rather than offensive and isn't singling out
| any particular entity for special scrutiny. If we don't
| know which particular company or technology is targeted
| at which time, if we don't know if the adversary is
| Russia or China or organized crime or corrupt law
| enforcement, the course of action is still the same. Make
| mass surveillance as difficult as possible for everybody
| everywhere.
| harry8 wrote:
| Money vs people re-deploying their votes. Who wins? Why?
| loteck wrote:
| Despite the day to day situation in congress, it seems inevitable
| that in the short to mid term, the US will have to stand up new
| privacy legislation in order to maintain participation in the
| digital economy.
|
| The question will be how they define privacy, and who will write
| the law.
|
| If activism doesn't interest you and you're looking for a
| reasonable shortcut, follow the work/proposals of Sen. Ron Wyden.
| He employs actual expert technologists who advise him on policy,
| and their expertise frequently shows up in the legislation he
| proposes.
| ssklash wrote:
| Wyden is the single best tech-related legislator in Congress,
| in my opinion. A great all around senator as well.
| dantheman wrote:
| He says the right things sometimes but is often ineffective -
| why didn't he call out Clapper when he was lying to him in
| congress? It is up to the legislature to control the
| government.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| I believe either he wasn't sure he was lying, or announcing
| that he was lying would have broken the Official Secrets
| Act.
| rileyphone wrote:
| > In May 2017, Wyden co-sponsored the Israel Anti-Boycott
| Act, Senate Bill 720, which made it a federal crime,
| punishable by a maximum sentence of 20 years
| imprisonment,[55] for Americans to encourage or participate
| in boycotts against Israel and Israeli settlements in the
| occupied Palestinian territories if protesting actions by the
| Israeli government. The bill would make it legal for U.S.
| states to refuse to do business with contractors that engage
| in boycotts against Israel.[56]
|
| It amazes me how otherwise sensible legislators look like
| goons when it's AIPAC calling, approving bills that make free
| speech a crime.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| While I am not in favor of the bill, his description of it
| is far different from the one presumably on his Wikipedia
| page.
|
| He said it adds to an existing law, one that has never sent
| a person to prison, that forbids people from following a
| boycott organized by a foreign state. You'd be free to form
| your own boycott.
|
| Again, not something I support. But on the "bullshit
| Representatives support" scale, not a huge deal
|
| https://pamplinmedia.com/pt/9-news/368374-250754-wyden-
| defen...
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > The bill would make it legal for U.S. states to refuse to
| do business with contractors that engage in boycotts
| against Israel.
|
| I fail to see the problem in the government not indirectly
| funding entities supporting agitation against a close
| military and political ally of the US.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| > maintain participation in the digital economy.
|
| I think your logic is reverse. There is an asymmetrical
| advantage for companies like Google and Facebook.
| loteck wrote:
| I think you've expressed a US-centric perspective, where the
| US leads the world and the world reacts.
|
| The rest of the world is advancing privacy legislation and
| making it difficult to do business in jurisdictions that
| don't enforce similar privacy concepts. This will
| increasingly become untenable for US businesses.
| the-dude wrote:
| I think he is pointing out the lack of legislation in the
| US is a positive for these US based multinationals : they
| extract valueable info from it, which they can use in other
| markets too.
|
| An upcoming EU startup which might want to target these
| multinationals markets is at a disadvantage because they
| can't.
| mgh2 wrote:
| So right: "This is now the classic Big Tech move: deploy money
| and armies of lobbyists to fight meaningful reforms in the
| shadows but claim to support them publicly."
| x0x0 wrote:
| We already have a de-facto national privacy law. It's the CPRA
| and it takes effect 1 Jan 2023.
| nixpulvis wrote:
| Am I missing something? This is a California law, no?
|
| Who is this "we" you speak of? Defacto-laws degrade my
| concept of structure in society.
| zucked wrote:
| It is a California regulation, yes. I suspect that OP is
| making reference to the fact that as California goes, often
| so goes the national policy. Or, at least that's how it's
| played out with regularity in the past.
| x0x0 wrote:
| CA is 14.6 of US GDP and 12% of the population. It's hard
| to have a large business in the US that doesn't have $25m
| revenue or handle the information of 100k CA residents, so
| there is very broad applicability.
| notreallyserio wrote:
| Fully half of Congress these last few decades has been
| violently opposed to basic privacy rights (with some of their
| supporters literally violent). I'm not sure we can expect any
| progress on this front until we see the congressional makeup
| shift substantially.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I'm curious how you expect the random people on HN to affect
| change by "following" someone's proposals sans activism?
|
| It seems like a "reasonable shortcut" around activism would
| involve... actually accomplishing things? Otherwise I can just
| say staying at home is a "reasonable shortcut" to getting to
| work. It's certainly much shorter, but it doesn't really
| accomplish the task at hand, no?
| loteck wrote:
| I'm suggesting that folks not interested in following the
| developing activism around privacy instead follow Wyden's
| work on this as their primary source of information, so that
| they can be aware of the best work going on and have a higher
| signal-to-noise ratio on this topic.
|
| When it comes time to actually accomplish things, there is no
| shortcut around action.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Fair enough - I misinterpreted the meaning behind your
| comment.
| hulitu wrote:
| > The question will be how they define privacy, and who will
| write the law.
|
| Just like in Germany. The rich will define the legislation and
| will write the law. Privacy means "If i am rich you have no
| right to look at my personal belongings". "If you are poor we
| need your credit score and some account ballance at least".
| umeshunni wrote:
| Politicians make meaningless statements on Twitter. News at 11.
| putlake wrote:
| The cartoon playing out in the media once again reminds me of
| Gell-Mann Amnesia because I used to work at Alexa. The lengths
| that they go to for preserving consumer privacy actually seemed
| absurd to me. Alexa engineers and applied scientists' lives would
| have been much easier if they didn't take customer privacy -- and
| their right to request and delete their data -- so seriously.
|
| Yes, they are lobbying against regulation. But that's because no
| business wants to have to deal with 50 different laws in 50
| states. They're saying let's have one federal regulation so it's
| easier to comply. It's not that they don't care about privacy --
| they very much do. In fact, all these large companies want
| regulation because it strengthens their moat. A startup won't
| have the resources to comply with such regulations on Day 1. They
| just want it to be reasonable because dealing with different
| state-level regulations is too much.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _no business wants to have to deal with 50 different laws in 50
| states._
|
| Amazon already does this in a thousand ways, from labor laws to
| labeling laws to paying thousands of different sales tax rates
| to thousands of different states, towns, and other
| municipalities.
|
| If this was a startup, maybe you'd have a case. But it's a
| trillion-dollar company. Suck it up, buttercup.
|
| Or just do the simple thing: Follow the most restrictive state
| laws. Somehow, following California emissions standards in the
| 1970's didn't bankrupt the auto industry. And following
| Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture standards didn't
| bankrupt the food industry in the early part of the last
| century.
|
| Following the rules is a cost of doing business. If Amazon
| can't afford to follow the rules, then it should go out of
| business and let someone else innovate.
| bllguo wrote:
| not wanting to deal with 50 sets of different rules is
| eminently reasonable. They have the resources to manage, so
| no improvement is necessary? Is that really the argument
| here?
| sitkack wrote:
| How about we regulate AND make it easy for startups to compete.
| Living in world where the big corps can all responsibly handle
| your data (what ever that _actually_ means) and competition
| stagnates. Our brand of capitalism pretends in runs on
| competition.
|
| *edit and from the article, if Amazon is quietly curtailing and
| preventing privacy laws on a state basis, what effort are they
| using ton unify those laws on a federal basis?
|
| > No major federal privacy legislation has passed Congress in
| years because members have been deadlocked on the issue.
|
| I assume Amazon is assisting here as well.
|
| All large corporations have a lot of folks at the edges
| actually doing the work. The internal controls for privacy are
| strong, but those are nearly orthogonal to the larger corporate
| goals. If you leak or improperly use customer data, that could
| have huge ramifications from the political and legal fall out.
| The amoral or immoral use of customer data at the whole org
| level are what people are generally talking about when it comes
| to data privacy from corporations.
| 1cvmask wrote:
| The laws are written to entrench incumbents and their moats.
| Startups have neither the resources or the lobbyists to
| compete while they try to get their bare feeble MVP off the
| ground. The only way you can do that is if you carve out
| exemptions for smaller companies. This law does not apply if
| you have less than 300 employees and 100 million is net
| turnover etc.
| sitkack wrote:
| How about we make privacy laws that are easy for _everyone_
| to comply with. No moats, no exemptions.
|
| We need strong personal privacy and the peeping tom
| corporations can offer value other than attempting to hack
| our wetware for profit.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| this cynical post misses the fact that corporate executives
| also decry invasions of privacy when it hits they
| themselves, their dear ones and their inner circles. You
| can bet that there is privacy available, but how, from
| whom, under what terms, and of course how much money does
| it cost.
| jjulius wrote:
| The original Reuters article[0] about Amazon's lobbying efforts
| addresses that point. It says:
|
| > Amazon said it wants one national privacy law rather than a
| "patchwork" of state regulations. Asked for details of any
| federal privacy legislation it has supported, Amazon did not
| name a specific bill. The company did provide three examples of
| what it described as statements of public support by its
| executives for federal consumer-privacy legislation.
|
| > In those cases, Reuters found, the executives were expressing
| either direct opposition to such a law, opposition to existing
| state privacy protections, or advocacy for industry-friendly
| measures opposed by consumer advocates. No major federal
| privacy legislation has passed Congress in years because
| members have been deadlocked on the issue.
|
| The article goes into great detail about the efforts to stop
| state-level legislation. If Amazon truly wanted to see a
| federal-level law, then we should expect to see them putting a
| similar sort of effort (or, hell, _any_ effort at all) at the
| federal level towards getting one written and passed. The
| simple fact is, we don 't.
|
| Until we see that effort from them, anyone using the excuse
| that, "State laws make this a difficult patchwork to navigate
| so we want a federal law," is just largely spouting bullshit.
|
| Edit: This is compounded by the fact that, as another user
| pointed out, they already deal with patchworked state laws in
| many other areas of their business, but they don't go to these
| levels to stop that.
|
| [0]https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-
| report/amazon-p...
| putlake wrote:
| Thank you for sharing the original Reuters article. In that
| article it says Amazon helped draft Virginia's privacy bill.
| So I guess they are making exactly the effort you talked
| about? But of course Reuters is calling them out on it:
|
| "In Virginia, the company boosted political donations tenfold
| over four years before persuading lawmakers this year to pass
| an industry-friendly privacy bill that Amazon itself
| drafted."
|
| After a lot of insinuations and handwaving about lobbying,
| the article has this short paragraph about what's actually in
| the law: "The Virginia law allows technology companies to
| track consumer searches on their platforms to create
| marketing profiles. It gave tech companies exemptions to
| collect and analyze smart-speaker recordings without customer
| consent. And it prevented consumers from suing companies over
| privacy violations."
|
| Seems totally reasonable to me. Amazon already lets you get a
| copy of your data and you can request for it to be deleted.
| And from having worked there (note: I no longer work there
| and don't have a dog in this fight), I know how the org ties
| its own hands and makes things difficult for itself, just to
| protect customer data and their right for that data to be
| deleted forever.
| magicalist wrote:
| > _So I guess they are making exactly the effort you talked
| about?_
|
| > _The Virginia law allows technology companies to track
| consumer searches on their platforms to create marketing
| profiles. It gave tech companies exemptions to collect and
| analyze smart-speaker recordings without customer consent.
| And it prevented consumers from suing companies over
| privacy violations. "_
|
| > _Seems totally reasonable to me. Amazon already lets you
| get a copy of your data and you can request for it to be
| deleted._
|
| Uh, what? Trying to give the benefit of the doubt but it
| seems disingenuous to call that a privacy bill in a
| positive sense, unclear what you mean is reasonable about
| it (though I guess people can disagree on that point), and
| while I can appreciate strong internal controls that are
| difficult to codify in law, that seems orthogonal to any of
| the merits of the "privacy" bill in question.
| jjulius wrote:
| >In that article it says Amazon helped draft Virginia's
| privacy bill. So I guess they are making exactly the effort
| you talked about?
|
| They are not. What you just highlighted is a privacy bill
| in the _state_ of Virginia. That is not at the federal
| level.
|
| >Seems totally reasonable to me.
|
| That's fair, for you. For many others, giving "tech
| companies exemptions to collect and analyze smart-speaker
| recordings _without customer consent_ " is unsettling, as
| is the fact that those customers would be "prevented ...
| from suing companies over privacy violations."
|
| >Amazon already lets you get a copy of your data and you
| can request for it to be deleted. And from having worked
| there (note: I no longer work there and don't have a dog in
| this fight), I know how the org ties its own hands and
| makes things difficult for itself, just to protect customer
| data and their right for that data to be deleted forever.
|
| In your initial comment, you said that, "The lengths that
| they go to for preserving consumer privacy actually seemed
| absurd to [you]". Yet the only reason Amazon lets you get a
| copy of your data and allows you to request it to be
| deleted is, per the same Reuters article, because the state
| of California forced their hand on that issue. The article
| states:
|
| >Under a 2018 California law that passed despite Amazon's
| opposition, consumers can access the personal data that
| technology companies keep on them. After losing that state
| battle, Amazon last year started allowing all U.S.
| consumers to access their data.
|
| >Amazon tried but failed to derail the 2018 California law,
| the first of its kind in the United States, that allowed
| consumers to request the personal data companies stored on
| them. The 2018 Amazon document reviewing executive goals
| discussed plans to oppose the measure, noting concern about
| its "right to know" provisions for consumers. The 2018
| public-policy update said of the proposal: "We strongly
| prefer no regulation, but if regulation becomes inevitable,
| we will seek amendment language to narrow any new
| requirements to the greatest extent possible."
|
| >The law's passage was considered a major failure
| internally, a former Amazon public-policy employee said. An
| Amazon legal-strategy document written after the bill
| became law called the measure emblematic of "troubling
| regulatory and legislative trends" that "caught us by
| surprise."
|
| So really, the only reason they "make things difficult for
| [themselves], just to protect customer data and their right
| for that data to be deleted forever" is because they're now
| legally required to. If they truly went to "absurd" lengths
| to protect consumer privacy, this obvious option should've
| been something they offered to consumers beforehand and not
| something that "caught [them] by surprise", which is a
| phrase taken from an actual internal Amazon document.
| Instead, _they fought against it_ and consider the fact
| that they had to give consumers this option to be a "major
| failure".
| jimkleiber wrote:
| I was just having a conversation yesterday about how complex it
| can be to follow 50 different state regulations, but also 200+
| different national regulations.
|
| Would the ideal case for you to be a federal (national)
| regulation or a global regulation?
| VRay wrote:
| And yet you're collecting insane amounts of data with little or
| no way to opt out of it, and storing that data in a country
| where the secret police can rifle through it any time with
| effectively no oversight.
| putlake wrote:
| You can ask to see the data Amazon has on you, and for it to
| be deleted. If you ask for it to be deleted, they will delete
| it all. And you can keep asking every month if you like. Not
| to mention no one is forcing you to use Alexa in the first
| place.
| Brendinooo wrote:
| A reminder that no one's making you use Amazon, especially the
| Alexa stuff.
|
| I invested in Mycroft to try and kickstart a privacy-focused
| alternative; the hardware isn't there yet but they've made good
| strides on the software side. You can invest too!
| https://www.startengine.com/mycroftai
|
| Make the world we want to live in.
| r00fus wrote:
| > A reminder that no one's making you use Amazon, especially
| the Alexa stuff.
|
| What happens when you kid's friends use and they visit? What
| happens when everything is "Alexa enabled" and comes on by
| default?
|
| Voting with your wallet doesn't work against sufficiently large
| vendor who's willing to lose money to achieve their goals.
| gopher_space wrote:
| Voting with your wallet isn't a situation where you're
| concerned about the results. The point isn't so much to
| change bad behavior as it is to disassociate yourself from
| it.
|
| If enough people become aware of the option and follow suit,
| change might occur that you'd like. That isn't what motivates
| you.
| tyingq wrote:
| Some of it is foisted on you whether you like it or not though.
| Like your across-the-street neighbor's Ring doorbell sharing HD
| footage of you, your house, etc, to law enforcement.
| willis936 wrote:
| I noticed an Alexa in a family member's bathroom recently.
| Yeah, _I_ don 't have to own them, but that doesn't mean
| their existence doesn't affect me. This is ripe for
| legislation.
| Brendinooo wrote:
| Sure. I just don't want to get my hopes too high that I'll
| get what I want in that arena...
| hulitu wrote:
| > A reminder that no one's making you use Amazon, especially
| the Alexa stuff.
|
| A reminder that even in EU Alexa seems to be ok ( from State
| POV) even if it violates GDPR.
| diveanon wrote:
| Or just leave the US and stop participating in this failed
| experiment.
|
| You can't make things better when half the people around you
| are making it worse.
| Brendinooo wrote:
| No thanks! I like my country just fine, and would prefer to
| make it better if I can.
| LogonType10 wrote:
| Amazon delivery vans scan nearby WiFi networks for SSIDs and
| tag that with geolocation. Amazon knows all about your _home
| network_.
| emptycan wrote:
| That's quite a leap from "scan SSID" to knowing "all about
| your home network" and sounds like hyperbole. What can I
| gather from just passively scanning SSID and possibly putting
| out some probes on a properly configured WiFi network? I
| imagine some things like number of hosts, MAC addresses,
| traffic stats - which is not ideal, but hardly what I would
| call knowing "all about it".
|
| I'm quite the privacy nut, but I always think its ridiculous
| that people cry foul about what people do with data that is
| being broadcast over the airwaves. If you really care about
| privacy and don't trust WPA2 then don't fucking use WiFi!
| nitrogen wrote:
| _broadcast over the airwaves_
|
| Intent matters a great deal. Very few people intend for
| their wifi to reach their neighbors or the street. There is
| already an expectation of privacy for visible and IR
| wavelengths of the EM spectrum.
| emptycan wrote:
| I don't agree intent has any relevance here vs the other
| issues at hand, and it is news to me that there is some
| actual distinct expectation of privacy with regards to
| wavelength as you state.
|
| Visible and IR wavelengths don't reach outside through
| non-windows, because of physics - but I don't think there
| is any inherent expectation of privacy - quite the
| opposite. If you leave your front bay window open and
| people outside can see in, and you call the police for
| privacy invasion they will laugh in your face in most
| places - in fact if you are doing something deemed
| obscene or distasteful you may be the one arrested - and
| for good reason. They'll tell you to get something to
| block the light like a curtain.
|
| Whether or not people intend it - wifi signals easily
| will make it to the street - and they're on shared
| spectrum. Especially if you're going to pollute the
| public ISM band - it's sort of on you to take whatever
| precautions you need to stay safe whether that is better
| encryption, a faraday cage or just abstaining and finding
| alternative means.
|
| If you start blasting loud noises 24/7 constantly in your
| neighborhood and someone complains, is your response
| going to be well, "I don't intend for this garbage to
| reach my neighbors"?
| mistrial9 wrote:
| Google pioneered this on mass-scale, I dont doubt it
| leecb wrote:
| Skyhook started doing this in 2003; their technology was
| used in earlier iPhone models to determine location without
| using GPS.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyhook_Wireless
|
| EDIT: used by iPhone OS until version 3.2:
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-DGB-16945
| jjulius wrote:
| This is the first time I've heard that claim. Can you please
| provide a source?
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| When reading reports like this, remember that HN commenters
| frequently try to discredit major news media reports on privacy
| issues by pointing to news websites' use of ad tech.
|
| Watch for it. It has been going on for years. HN commenters will
| infallibly comment on news reports relating to privacy issues by
| pointing to news website use of ad tech.
|
| The question to ask is would this argument have made a difference
| here. Did these members of the Senate and House consider if a
| Reuters website uses ad tech.
|
| If the Reuters reporting is factually correct, then Reuters' use
| of ad tech should not have any effect on the potential for others
| to take action on the basis of Reuters reporting. As the saying
| goes, "Don't shoot the messenger."
|
| HN commenters keep trying to shoot the messenger. It only diverts
| attention from any facts contained in the message.
| comeonseriously wrote:
| Wait, so Amazon allegedly undermined privacy by spending tons of
| money lobbying, and Congress wants to pass legislation on
| privacy. How about passing legislation on LOBBYING?
| dhimes wrote:
| This is the real problem. All meetings should be public and a
| matter of public record. We may need some workarounds for
| Defense/Sensitive issues, but standard conversations need to be
| disclosed.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| US lawmakers can't even take on robocallers and spammers, so I
| don't have much faith in their ability. When they are willing to
| actually impose harsh criminal liability on companies and
| employees like they do for citizens, then things like this won't
| be an issue.
| [deleted]
| criddell wrote:
| I had great hope when I heard about the STIR/SHAKEN protocol
| [1].
|
| It's been in effect for five months now and I think I get more
| spam calls than ever before.
|
| [1]: https://www.fcc.gov/call-authentication
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Same here. I feel like of they'd just label robocallers
| terrorist and treat them as such, it would be a lot harder to
| find people willing to take that risk even in foreign
| countries. Sanctions would go a long way as well in other
| countries taking it more seriously.
| dboreham wrote:
| US lawmakers _are_ the robocallers and spammers.
| aww_dang wrote:
| "U.S. lawmakers call for regulatory capture to further benefit
| the donor classes, because they _deeply_ _care_ about your
| privacy... "
|
| Are these not the same politicians that passed mass surveillance
| legislation?
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