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Don Marti: Privacy Laws For Slacker States
It has come to my attention that there are still 15 or so states in the USA without privacy laws. This is understandable. We all have a lot of stuff to deal with. And of course there’s the problem of privacy law compliance turning into a time-suck for small businesses. The more that the laws and regulations pile up, the harder to pick out everything you need to do from all those damn PDFs. And it’s not just small companies. Honda just got around to dealing with some obvious differences between GDPR compliance and CCPA compliance that I pointed out back in 2020. And that’s an old PDF and a big company.
But the good news for slacker states is that doing the most work, cranking out the most lines of code, or the most pages of PDFs, or whatever, does not necessarily produce the best results. Given the amount of work that other states, and juridictions like the European Union, have already done on privacy, a slacker state can, right now, get not just the best privacy protection but also save a lot of time and grief for state employees and for business people in your state.
You need two laws. And we know that people are going to print them out, so please keep them short. (Maybe do a printer ink right to refill law next year?)
First, surveillance licenses for Big Tech. This gets you a few benefits.
Focus on the riskiest companies with the most money and staff for compliance—don’t put extra work on small local businesses.
Save your state’s attorney general and their staff a bunch of time. They’re not Big Tech’s support department. If a Big Tech company drops the ball on user support, just suspend their surveillance license until they clean up their act, like a problem bar and their liquor license.
You can define surveillance really briefly in the law and make the big out-of-state companies do the work of describing their surveillance practices in their license application.
That one is pretty easy to do as long as you focus purely on inbound data, the surveillance part, and don’t touch anything that sounds like speech
from the company to others. And you can push most of the work off onto Big Tech and a new surveillance licensing board. I’m sure every state has people who would be willing to get on one of those.
Second, copy all the details from other states and countries. The other law would be focused on maximum privacy, minimum effort. The goal is to make a law that small business people can comply with, without even reading it, because they already had to do some privacy thing for somewhere else. Two parts.
Any privacy feature offered in some other jurisdiction must be offered here, too. A company only breaks the law if someone out-of-state gets a privacy feature that someone in-state doesn’t.
This law may be enforced by anyone except a state employee. (Borrow the Texas S.B. 8 legal hack, to protect yourself from Big Tech industry groups trying to block the law by starting an expensive case.)
A small business that operates purely locally can just do their thing. But if they already have some your California privacy rights
feature or whatever, they just turn it on for this state too. Easier compliance project for the companies, better privacy for the users, no enforcement effort for the state, it’s a win-win-win. After all, state legislators don’t get paid by the page, and we each only get one set of carpal tunnels.
Related
there ought to be a law (Some stuff you can do to look busy next year maybe?)
advertising personalization: good for you?
Bonus links
Meta, Apparently, Really Wants Everyone To Read This Book (By Trying To Ban It) by Mike Masnick. Macmillan showed up just long enough to point out the blazingly obvious: they never signed any agreement with Meta and thus can’t be bound by arbitration. The arbitrator, displaying basic common sense, had to admit they had no jurisdiction over Macmillan.
Micah Lee writes, Not only is Substack right-wing broligarchy garbage, it’s way more expensive than Ghost Substack takes a 10% cut of every transaction, while Ghost doesn’t take any cut at all. Instead, Ghost charges based on the number of newsletter subscribers you have.
AI Search Has A Citation Problem by Klaudia Jaźwińska and Aisvarya Chandrasekar. Chatbots were generally bad at declining to answer questions they couldn’t answer accurately, offering incorrect or speculative answers instead.
(related: fix Google Search)
It’s Official: the Cybertruck is More Explosive than the Ford Pinto Update: In case you were wondering, are these sample sizes statistically significant? The resident scientist over at Some Weekend Reading demonstrates: yes they are!
Tesla Cybertruck vs Ford Pinto: Which is the Bigger Fire-Trap? (The fatality rate may also be related to the electric doors problem: Testimony Reveals Doors Would Not Open on Cybertruck That Caught Fire in Piedmont, Killing Three. It’s possible that some of the people listed as victims would have survived if they had been able to exit.)
