>> "He calls the government to take a stand for privacy by establishing an agency that will enforce privacy laws and act as a representative of individual privacy."
> Each EU country for instance is obliged to have such an agency.
This sounds like a good way to create a centralized clearinghouse for abuse and corruption via regulatory capture.
The viable solution here will be to develop and use technologies that protect privacy as part of their inherent design; relying on the oversight of bureaucracies, especially political ones, to protect privacy just isn't going to work.
I want to subscribe to a print magazine. I send my payment to them, with my name and address. Each month they send me a magazine. At the end of the year they send me a couple of reminders.
What technologies will protect my information?
Here, the magazine has to register. They need to say what information they're collecting, and why. There are penalties if they then do other stuff with the information.
Your name and address are already matters of public record, anyway. This is hardly the kind of data that we're talking about.
For important, sensitive data - the kind of stuff that could someone could use to blackmail or manipulate you - the relevant technology is cryptography.
The bureaucratic solution will inevitably end in anyone you send any data to being required by law to transfer the data itself to a central government-run data store which will make PRISM look trivial in comparison.
>> Each EU country for instance is obliged to have such an agency.
> This sounds like a good way to create a centralized clearinghouse for abuse and corruption via regulatory capture.
The EU has these agencies.
You said
> The bureaucratic solution will inevitably end in anyone you send any data to being required by law to transfer the data itself to a central government-run data store
> Each EU country for instance is obliged to have such an agency.
This sounds like a good way to create a centralized clearinghouse for abuse and corruption via regulatory capture.
The viable solution here will be to develop and use technologies that protect privacy as part of their inherent design; relying on the oversight of bureaucracies, especially political ones, to protect privacy just isn't going to work.