Should You Have All The Privacy You Want?

[ThomWV]

Its a simple enough question and it faces the notion that in these days you can not build a wall around yourself.

Should you be able to control personal information tagged to you, and no one else (other than being available to a court operating within its jurisdiction), no matter where it resides?

Should you be able to order the destruction of information held by others that is tagged to you?

Should it be mandatory that any and all individuals or organizations who collect or store information tagged to you disclose what and how much information is held periodically (meaning at regular intervals - say once every 6 months or so)?

Are such laws required in this day and age? I think so.

[leftyladyfrommo]

1. I certainly don't think Google should store information

if only for the reason that it can be supoened (sp) by the government. That is an unbelievable intrusion.

[MindPilot]

4. The information should not in any way be linked

to individuals. Demographic info is of course necessary for a lot of society's functions, but it shouldn't be so detailed that it can be used to identify a person or organization.

Edited to actually say what I meant to say

[MindPilot]

2. Right to Privacy amendment

should be a major plank in the democratic platform.

And to answer your question, yes.

[acmejack]

3. Well, they're the ones that are so big on "intellectual property"

As granny always said; "What's sauce for the goose, is sauce for the gander". Perhaps she never actually said that but it is certainly appropriate for this occasion.

[Gormy Cuss]

5. The right to be let alone

The government owes us the right to privacy as long as our private actions are legal and not harmful to others. Private entities have proven that they do not self-regulate sufficiently to protect our privacy and because of this it's time for government to put the brakes on the unfettered collection and mining of information by private companies without regard to an individual's wish to remain private. ZABAsearch and other purveyors of profile data have thwarted the intent of public access laws by making records that were previously disjointed and difficult to merge readily available for a token fee (much of it is GIGO, but GIGO profiles are not harmless to the individual.)

First and foremost, the government must held accountable for the misuse of Social Security Numbers as universal identifiers. There are a limit set of private entities who may have a legitimate reason to collect and store SSN data for the purpose of reporting to the IRS and other federally mandated uses. For all other reasons, private entities should be required to pay a user fee to the SS trust fund for each time the number is referenced in a transaction outside of these parameters. Business is business: the government set up and maintains the SSN master file and private companies have been using it for free. Time to pay up.

We should have the right to demand that credit bureaus track down and fix errors, rather than be expected to do the legwork to clean up a mess caused by lackadaisical data reporting and management. We should have the right to exclude from credit bureau data our bank and investment balances if there is no negative credit associated with them. We should have the right to limit release of credit bureau data to creditors only and even then have to option to release a credit score rather than the full record.

We should be able to opt out of junk mail with a procedure as simple as the Do-Not_call registry for telephone solicitations. By extension Do-Not-Email, Do-Not-Text messages, etc.

We should have the assurance that corporate data security lapses result in automatic and sizable fines when the loss is the result of subpar security practices such as letting a contractor load unencrypted data on laptops.

If the national Democratic party doesn't understand that this is a key unifying platform issue, they are missing the boat.