“There are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual consent and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.”
James Madison
To the framers of our Constitution the issue of personal privacy was not of overriding concern. Rather, the absolute right to one’s privacy was taken for granted!
Over the next century, our customs, rural agrarian population and existing technologies served to preserve the right of individuals to be left alone, if not ignored. Beginning in the late 1800s, however, the growth and intrusion of governmental institutions and segments of the private sector inexorably began to erode many fundamental rights, including those protecting individual privacy.
It was bad enough when Equifax, Transunion, Experian and Dunn & Bradstreet as well as numerous retail and other businesses, were, defacto, allowed to accumulate and sell data on Americans without their consent while having no legal or moral obligation to ensure the veracity of such information.
With the advent of the Internet and companies such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter, millions of people have willingly, and in most cases without being aware of it, ceded their personal, financial, medical and other data to these and hundreds of other companies whose business models are based on amassing and peddling personal information about its users to advertisers. Compounding this loss of privacy are questionable and unproven algorithms manipulating such data to make unfounded assumptions about people that can materially affect their lives.
Despite assurances individuals’ data is safe, one company and governmental agency after another (including Yahoo, eBay, Linked-in, JP Morgan, AOL, Target, Home Depot, Equifax, U.S. Office of Personnel Management, and Sony, to name a few), have been “hacked” and sensitive personal information on more than 200 million Americans has been compromised.
Recent revelations that a massive amount of information from Facebook was shared with the data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica is yet another example of private sector parasites having free rein to sell information on private citizens to anyone with the interest in and cash to purchase it.
The fundamental question is; whether any entity should have any right to collect, maintain, manipulate and distribute personal information on individuals without their affirmative consent?
Rather than moving swiftly to protect the public, Congress has continually caved to industry, lobbyist and campaign donations pressures resulting in a deafening legislative silence.
Meantime, Europe has bucked Congress’ abysmal track record of inaction passing the General Data Protection Regulations setting new rules for how companies manage and share personal data. It mandates any time a company collects personal data on a European Union citizen, it will need explicit and informed consent from that person. Users may also revoke that consent, and can demand all the data a company has on them as a way to the validate the content and verify their consent. Moreover, penalties are severe enough to gain the private sector’s attention with maximum fines per violation set at 4% of a company’s global turnover (or $20 million, whichever is larger).
The line must be drawn between both the government’s and private sector’s alleged and real need for information on private citizens and the right to personal privacy to which people are entitled and which greatly outweighs any and all private sector economic interests.
It is past time for Congress to enact meaningful legislation to vigorously protect the personal privacy of individuals similar to that in the EU. Anything else is unacceptable!
