What's happening to consumer privacy? The public backlash against this wholesale data acquisition has started to show itself in legislation around the world. The European Union passed laws years ago meant to curb Google’s monitoring of individuals and just recently California passed Proposition 24. This new law is meant to strengthen digital privacy laws, reducing how much companies can intrude on your digital life. While the proposition certainly identifies the right problem, does it identify the right solution?
By now, it is no secret that companies of all kinds are regularly mining data, your data and doing all sorts of things with it. They use it to tailor what ads show up in your browser, what videos show up in your YouTube feed, the news stories that you see in your aggregator, their own product development, and, most notoriously, sell it to third parties for who knows what purposes. Many have been voicing their displeasure with this situation for years and finally regular people are starting to wake up to the fact that important information about them is being collected and used in ways they may or may not approve of.
The biggest indicator that Proposition 24 won’t work as planned is that Californai would be setting up a massive new agency with a $10 million annual budget. As anyone who knows anything about government is well aware, setting up a government agency is not the most efficient way to spend $10 million a year. Especially since all you really need to do is give people the opportunity to opt out of all the data collection and sharing that a given company does. All that needs to happen is there be a box for the user to check and a few lines of code to make sure that person’s data is not getting collected as it normally would. How easy is that to accomplish? It would take the software gurus at TARTLE about five hours to put together the necessary code. Five hours for a couple of people at a computer. Maybe throw in a couple bottles of kombucha to keep things moving. That’s a lot less than a state run agency with a building and dozens, if not hundreds of people working for it.
Of course, there should be some sort of enforcement, some way of making sure that companies really are opting people out. But let’s be honest, is the government really the best option here? After all, we learned years ago through the information leaked by Edward Snowden just how much information the government was collecting on people through means of, shall we say, dubious legality. Not to mention, these kinds of agencies have a tendency to grow overtime. While this agency would be a California agency at first, it would be a short period of time before other states followed suit, which would quickly morph into a federal agency. By that point, the rules and regulations concerning data would become so convoluted, they would make the convoluted terms of service we all blindly accept look like an Eric Carle children’s book. That is not a model for the future that any normal person wants to see.
What are we to do then? Well, you’ve heard the phrases “vote with your dollar” and “vote with your feet”. You can do something similar when you join TARTLE. You vote with your data. Don’t let the big companies and the government have it in the first place. You don’t have to worry so much about them honoring their opt-out protocols because we are doing it for you. Your data goes through our encryption and the only way it gets out is if you decide it should. We don’t even do anything with it without your permission.
While the stated intent behind Proposition 24 is good and something we wholeheartedly agree with at TARTLE, the legislation itself is as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said, “a mixed bag of partial steps both backwards and forwards”. Or to put it another way, good intentions do not good laws make. That is one of the real goals of TARTLE, to represent a third way. Our existence reminds people that they don’t have to choose between global conglomerates or massive governments. TARTLE reminds people that they can choose to manage things on their own, to take control of their data, and their lives.
What’s your data worth? Sign up and join the TARTLE Marketplace with this link here.
