These laws, norms, and such have been with us for a while now... essentially since the internet usage dataset started becoming what it is.
From a legal standpoint, what matters is principle/precedent. Law works on principle, and doesn't often deal with volume issues. But this is a digital issue. With data, quantity is a quality.
On one end of the spectrum, you can have a cop obtaining a printout that he can read, evaluate and use for an investigation. Practically, this is similar to obtaining a building's visitor log or CCTV footage.
On the other end of this spectrum, you have the police version of Google or FB's datasets. Everyone's data, lots of data points. NN evaluation and all that goes with it. Operationalising that yields a different way of policing entirely.
I have no complaints to judges or lawyers that treat this all in the same way. That's their job. Legislators, OTOH, do need to make this distinction. The volume of data, and policing methods utilizing it matter a lot. It also dovetails with commercial data gathering and utilization.
Ultimately, I think we need some new principles, new articulations of rights and limits on power. Working by analogy to pen and paper has the tendency to make sense in landmark examples, but miss the actual implications.
Legislators need to think outside of a lawyerly frame where analogies and principled comparisons are the basis.
From a legal standpoint, what matters is principle/precedent. Law works on principle, and doesn't often deal with volume issues. But this is a digital issue. With data, quantity is a quality.
On one end of the spectrum, you can have a cop obtaining a printout that he can read, evaluate and use for an investigation. Practically, this is similar to obtaining a building's visitor log or CCTV footage.
On the other end of this spectrum, you have the police version of Google or FB's datasets. Everyone's data, lots of data points. NN evaluation and all that goes with it. Operationalising that yields a different way of policing entirely.
I have no complaints to judges or lawyers that treat this all in the same way. That's their job. Legislators, OTOH, do need to make this distinction. The volume of data, and policing methods utilizing it matter a lot. It also dovetails with commercial data gathering and utilization.
Ultimately, I think we need some new principles, new articulations of rights and limits on power. Working by analogy to pen and paper has the tendency to make sense in landmark examples, but miss the actual implications.
Legislators need to think outside of a lawyerly frame where analogies and principled comparisons are the basis.