Privacy

32173 readers

228 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

423

Big Tech is Trying to Burn Privacy to the Ground–And They’re Using Big Tobacco’s Strategy to Do It (www.techpolicy.press)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

14 comments fedilink hide all child comments

With the looming presidential election, a United States Supreme Court majority that is hostile to civil rights, and a conservative effort to rollback AI safeguards, strong state privacy laws have never been more important.

But late last month, efforts to pass a federal comprehensive privacy law died in committee, leaving the future of privacy in the US unclear. Who that future serves largely rests on one crucial issue: the preemption of state law.

On one side, the biggest names in technology are trying to use their might to force Congress to override crucial state-level privacy laws that have protected people for years.

On the other side is the American Civil Liberties Union and 55 other organizations. We explained in our own letter to Congress how a federal bill that preempts state law would leave millions with fewer rights than they had before. It would also forbid state legislatures from passing stronger protections in the future, smothering progress for generations to come.

Preemption has long been the tech industry’s holy grail. But few know its history. It turns out, Big Tech is pulling straight from the toxic strategy that Big Tobacco used in the 1990s...

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

In 2022, industry front groups co-signed a letter to Congress arguing that “[a] growing patchwork of state laws are emerging which threaten innovation and create consumer and business confusion.” In 2024, they were at it again this Congress, using the term four times in five paragraphs.

Big Tobacco did the same thing.

Is this really a fair comparison though? A variety of local laws about smoking in restaurants makes sense because restaurants are inherently tied to their physical location. A restaurant would only have to know and follow the rules of their town, state and country, and the town can take the time to ensure that its laws are compatible with the state and country laws.

A website is global. Every local law that can be enforced must be followed, and the burden isn't on legislators to make sure their rules are compatible with all the other rules. Needing to make a subtly different version of a website to serve to every state and country to be in full compliance with all their different rules, and needing to have lawyers check over all of them would create a situation where the difficulty and expense of making and maintaining a website or other online service is prohibitive. That seems like a legitimate reason to want unified standards.

To be fair there are plenty of privacy regulations that this wouldn't apply to, like the example the article gives of San Francisco banning the use of facial recognition tech by police. But the industry complaint linked in the article references laws like https://www.oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa and https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/sb21-190 that obligate websites to fulfill particular demands made by residents of those states respectively. Subtle differences in those sorts of laws seems like something that could cause actual problems, unlike differences in smoking laws.