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Democrats Draft an 'Internet Bill of Rights' To Regulate Big Tech (geekwire.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from GeekWire: Democrats in the House of Representatives are promising to push for federal regulation of tech companies if they retake the House in November. Rep. Ro Khanna, who represents Silicon Valley, has drafted an Internet Bill of Rights and shared it with influential tech journalist Kara Swisher. It includes liberties like the right to access and transport personal data collected about you, an opt-in framework for data collection, and net neutrality protections. Rep. Nancy Pelosi charged Khanna with drafting the principles, according to an essay by Swisher published in the New York Times.
The list includes the right to obtain, correct, or delete personal data "where context appropriate and with a fair process." That's not nearly as sweeping as the "right to be forgotten" included in Europe's landmark General Data Protection Regulation, which took effect earlier this year. The Bill of Rights would also require companies that collect personal data to notify users of breaches in "a timely manner" and mandate "reasonable business practices and accountability to protect your privacy." Swisher calls it "an admirable list" but is concerned that codifying the principles "will be like pushing back the ocean." Many big tech companies have business models built entirely on collecting as much user data as possible.
The list includes the right to obtain, correct, or delete personal data "where context appropriate and with a fair process." That's not nearly as sweeping as the "right to be forgotten" included in Europe's landmark General Data Protection Regulation, which took effect earlier this year. The Bill of Rights would also require companies that collect personal data to notify users of breaches in "a timely manner" and mandate "reasonable business practices and accountability to protect your privacy." Swisher calls it "an admirable list" but is concerned that codifying the principles "will be like pushing back the ocean." Many big tech companies have business models built entirely on collecting as much user data as possible.
...because this is how you get Big Tech to support Republicans. Great Job(tm)!
don't get fooled, they're in it for themselves. Big Tech spent a ton of money getting Dems in office who support anti-work politics (like the H1-B program, tax incentives for offshoring, etc). Ro Khanna is the real deal. An actual populist who refuses corporate PAC money. He doesn't fear Big Tech because he doesn't take their money.
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I don't see anything there about requiring free speech on major platforms that form the de facto public space today. The Democrats not enforcing free speech. I wonder why that might be?
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
the employees goals aren't necessarily aligned with management, and a highly educated workforce generally knows this. That's why CA is in general more liberal. They don't trust their management.
At the end of the day the only thing big enough to stand up to a Mega corp is a central government. Yeah, it's a risk, but without organization we just get picked off by robber barons.
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"enforcing free speech" isn't a thing. Obligatory XKCD comic.
If you want a platform people can post to that has those protections it needs to be government run. Make a gov't competitor to Facebook & Youtube if you want that. But generally people who deride Democrats for something they have no control over are opposed to "Big G'vmt" doing public works projects...
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The big tech companies have the Democrats in their back pocket. This stuff is perfectly fine to bluster about before the elections. In fact it's good politics to make promises like this.
The D's who have consistently been the party of tech forever are outraged at tech and claim the R's used it to take their election. They form an internet bill of rights and get people in arms about privacy (which is nothing new). But they mostly remain silent on net neutrality, his stance on the issue is in violation of several concerns of the bill of rights but the D's solidly distract you from that aspect of our supreme court nominee.
The R's attack net neutrality directly, the major funding in opposition is the big tech companies.
The result? Carriers of internet traffic who can not only throttle but alter everything down to documents communicated with your attorney on the wire. This is all the same team. Hell there is probably a backend deal to use "immigration reform" to bring back more not Hispanic but Asian H1B and similar in-sourced workers to compensate the tech companies and cost of business level agreements will be put in place with the carriers. The carriers aren't about trying to charge FB so much as they want to head off phone style regulations and unions like the telecoms have to interact with. How do you think verizon managed to own MCI for long without being considered a telco?
This tells me that this is a typical campaign promise which will be quickly forgotten once the D's and R's have maintained their duopoly. Can't have any of them outsiders messing things up now, can we?
Go on, citizen, stamp the vote card. R or D, your choice.
Many criminals have build a career of committing crime. If caught they are expected to be punished. Companies should expect the same - and the punishment should be served by the directors.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Indeed, I don't know how you could trust anyone who could travel back in time and mind-control you into sexually assaulting 3 different women and then both lying about it under oath and revealing extreme partisan bias in the process. He is a perfectly innocent man in an alternate timeline.
(But seriously, that's not even the worst of it. His laughably terrible and legally outright wrong executive power maximalist views are.)
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
People keep using 'net neutrality' as if it's going to provide some kind of amazing magical protection for end users... The one thing that doesn't 'fix' your user experience is making rules with thousands of loopholes in them. And that's what you get when you demand lawmakers to fix problems for you. They build a compromise based on what's best for the providers and what is acceptable to them to give up to make you feel better. Holding data hoarding companies to a standard of responsible use for your personal info is perfect. that stuff needs to be defined as your own personal property, that you lease,rent or otherwise permit them to use it for due and fair consideration.
You will be able to keep your paper insulated wireline monopoly network.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
We already have a Bill of Rights. Now, where is my right to keep and bear weapons, huh? No Democrat shall do much talking about "rights", unless they wholly and unequivocally support the Bill of Rights — especially, the first two Amendments.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Why hasn't Stallman been in the NYtimes in the past 30 years. It's hard to feel bad for anyone at this point in the these matters.
Republicans are as fed up with, if not more, with Big Tech as Democrats are. This isn't a "elect us and we'll do it" moment, and Republicans can (and, IMO, should) work with them and push it through in a bipartisan fashion.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
The list is a precursor to regulating the Internet. Read the thing, it's overly broad: "unfairly discriminated against based on your personal data" - what is 'fair' discrimination? What is personal data? Does that mean I can't call your unscientific viewpoints out?
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... over the last 200 years. The Democrats and republicans are the enemies of the people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
(I'm a small web developer, self employed for 25 years and counting, and obviously a general web consumer. )
I think there's a much simpler way to start this mayhem.
I'd be happy with two buttons:
1. show me everything you have on me, one big single-web-page human-readable/printable/migratable dump of information.
2. delete it all. please and thank you.
I think everything else can either be added much later, or will work itself out with market forces. Today, the trouble is that people don't know what's known about them, and can't do anything about it anyway. These two buttons solve the problem.
And with #2 being so readily available, you'd see just how quickly big companies apologize and make-things-right in the hopes of not losing huge swaths of their user data.
Compared to the GDPR (which is phenominal, but also a phenominally big step to take all at once), the above two are relatively easy for almost any company to implement.
(N.B. if you've read the GDPR thoroughly, and I mean the actual document, my #2 is the short-circuit way out of about 95% of the technical requirements that the GDPR puts on businesses.)
Politicians don't protect and uphold the important bill of rights, so they are going to worry about petty shit on the internet? They should get back to their roots and protect and uphold the constitution.
You do know that the FBI cleared him? He's now easily the most investigated nominee in US history. The FBI has looked into these allegations - I think this last week was the fifth time - and found them not to be credible.
You know those anti-Kavanaugh protesters? Backed by Soros money. There's an actual paper trail. You can prove it. Apparently Soros couldn't risk not getting the tax write-off for giving money to protesters.
And if his views are legally wrong, you have nothing to worry about. There are eight other judges on the Supreme Court.
If, however, they're right, and the only reason those views were suppressed before was due to judicial activism from the liberal judges - well, then maybe you should be worried. Because for the first time in my life that I can remember, we are finally going to have a Supreme Court that believes in the Constitution. I could not be happier.
"Many big tech companies have business models built entirely on collecting as much user data as possible."
Why is Snark Required?
it has a mod system. That's, by your estimation, censorship.
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Can we get a flyer's bill of rights first? Maybe with minimum legroom, seat width, seat pitch guarantees?
These "rights" don't make any sense in a global network. Your "rights" are going to end when the borders of the country proclaiming them end. What this will do is significantly drive up the costs of using these (formerly) free systems.
As examples:
(5) to move all personal data from one network to the next;
This would require both the source, and destination, networks (systems?) to have compatible data export, and import, APIs. Who is going to pay for this, and determine which networks are supported?
(9) not to be unfairly discriminated against or exploited based on your personal data; and
This makes no sense. Who is going to determine what is "fair" and what constitutes "personal data?" I am completely OK with being discriminated against, and/or exploited, because I want to watch a video Amazon decided to charge me to watch, as opposed to one of their free videos.
I can pretty much go through every single one of these "rights" and tell you exactly how they will infringe on someone else's rights, and require substantial development costs to implement.
If this list started with data that our own government collects on our citizens, and an foreigners, I would support it. I think that would be a much better place to start, and would immediately put an end to all of the Federal dragnet data collection that goes on "to fight terrorism." Instead of (1) to have access to and knowledge of all collection and uses of personal data by companies; why not replace companies with governments. That seems like a good starting point to me.
These kind of rights will require a police force to enforce them, and judges to uphold other laws, as well as whatever legislative body is going to proclaim them. Those are three components of law. I do not want the Federal government to become the internet police. That sounds terrible to me.
an opt-in framework for data collection,
and the way it is now? You sign up for an account and it says, "Your use of this site constitutes your acceptance of our terms and conditions" and the T&C says "we will collect your data". That sounds like 'opt in' to me.
J
Could it be that they know that this makes them popular without ever having to fear that it could pass?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
/. is required to take down the first in virtually all countries and the second in most. It would also generally be considered responsible journalism to take down the second as giving murders a platform is considered irresponsible.
/. hacking servers. They'll fix the bug and move on. It'd be a dick move to do it without proper notice though.
Go right ahead and post your how-to guide on
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but if you're on their property trespassing and refuse to leave then you're the one committing a crime. In the physical world I'd call the cops on you, but in the digital one I just delete your account.
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Democrats had over eight years to reign in Big Tech and now all of a sudden they see a problem?
sexually assaulting 3 different women and then both lying about it under oath and revealing extreme partisan bias in the process
This is where Dems accuse Republicans of what they have done. They defend domestic abuser Keith Ellison while propping up lies in highly partisan fashion.
Thankfully, the most liberal Republican, Susan Collins, was not bullied and saw through this smear campaign, and is casting a principled vote.
Maybe the Dems can run on something other than their Maoist struggle session tactics.
Keith Ellison's being pushed out of the DNC already.
Is that why the Dems defended him with their "independent" investigation? What Democrat has publicly disavowed Ellison and called for him to step down and withdraw from his current election contest?
And how do the Republicans respond to the triple allegations of sexual assault against Kavanaugh?
The evidence was examined and given a public hearing. How do Dems respond to the inconsistencies, refutations by supposed witnesses (including a lifelong friend), and proven lies? How do they respond to withheld evidence, such at the therapists notes? They scream and stamp their feet, and double down on their lunacy.
Do you seriously believe there were "gang rape parties" that the 3rd accuser attended, that there were over ten such events, and that she kept attending them before she became one of the victims? Even on the surface it's absurd, let alone the complete lack of any substantiation.
Even people on the left are turning their backs on the rat-faced, publicity-seeking lawyer Avenatti.
not in a modern setting. Where gov't breaks down is when food get scarce.
as for who decides what is reasonable, there's only one answer to that: Democracy with mandatory voting and literally all citizens have a vote. And I mean _all_ citizens. I don't care if you're a mass murderer on death row, you get a vote. The only way to have Democracy is to end voter suppression, and the only way to do that is to make voting the one right we never compromise on.
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[everyone has the right to] (1) to have access to and knowledge of all collection and uses of personal data by companies;
"This isn't personal data, it's meta-data. Or it's public data. BOOM dodged.
(2) to opt-in consent to the collection of personal data by any party and to the sharing of personal data with a third party;
"We absolutely give them the right to opt-in. We also conveniently do it on their behalf as well. "
(3) where context appropriate and with a fair process, to obtain, correct or delete personal data controlled by any company and to have those requests honored by third parties;
"We don't feel that would be appropriate here."
(4) to have personal data secured and to be notified in a timely manner when a security breach or unauthorized access of personal data is discovered;
"Yes, it took our engineers 6 months to close the security hole. That's timely. You don't want to endanger users by making this vulnerability public, would you?"
(5) to move all personal data from one network to the next;
"Yep. There's the text box. Get to typing. Go for it."
(6) to access and use the internet without internet service providers blocking, throttling, engaging in paid prioritization or otherwise unfairly favoring content, applications, services or devices;
SOLID! This right here is the meaty content of the bill that warrants the whole thing passing I will support even the stupid fluffy dodgeable stuff just to get it in there.
(7) to internet service without the collection of data that is unnecessary for providing the requested service absent opt-in consent;
Hmmmm, I'm not sure about the "absent op-in consent", but it's hella easy to justify necessity as "We need to make money".
(8) to have access to multiple viable, affordable internet platforms, services and providers with clear and transparent pricing;
That sounds really nice. ....How you going to enforce that?
(9) not to be unfairly discriminated against or exploited based on your personal data; and
"That's not personal data", "It's quite fair discrimination", "It's not discrimination", "It's not 'against' or 'exploited', we're providing a SERVICE by promoting traffic that they would appear to be interested in based on their entirely public profile generated by non-discriminating computers equally applies to all customers. We just happen to get paid for the promotion."
(10) to have an entity that collects your personal data have reasonable business practices and accountability to protect your privacy.
Sweet jesus "reasonable business practices" is about as vague and fluffy as I can imagine. It amounts to "Pleeeeeeaaaaaaase don't screw us."
Overton window. When the Dems moved right the GOP had to follow to suit to maintain a separate identity. Trouble is that left the Dems without an identity of their own.
One thing the left does need to deal with though is the fallout and backlash from #METOO. I'm not sure how either. On the one had we need to stop this crap where powerful men can can force themselves on vulnerable women. OTOH it's scary to think that an hitting on a girl awkwardly or making a dirty joke can cost you everything (Al Franklin anyone?). We need to find a balance. But I don't now how. The GOP doesn't have this problem since they're perfectly Ok with going the other way and letting women be victimized as long as the tax cuts keep on coming...
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What's more distressing is that with every election you get less and less of a choice. A while ago, you could actually vote for the person you think is the better one for the job. Now you're reduced to voting for the one you think could fuck up less.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.