California Eyes Data Privacy Measure

Re:California Eyes Data Privacy Measure by Arainach on Monday May 28, 2018 @01:14PM (#17173532)

The public aren't lawyers. One of the points of representative democracy is supposed to be that legislators are more experienced with the practice of writing effective laws - laws that will have their intended effect and stand up in court. With the initiative process, it's easy to find text that sounds nice when you describe it in 30 seconds to people on the street but is either ineffective or has awful unexpected consequences.

That's not to say that there's no place for the initiative process, but it's not without its problems.

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Re:California Eyes Data Privacy Measure by titzer on Tuesday May 29, 2018 @03:59AM (#17177225)

Your criticism is valid, but keep in mind the alternative is generally legislation written by lobbyists.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/10/googl...

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Re:California Eyes Data Privacy Measure by tunareter on Monday May 28, 2018 @04:12PM (#17174561)

If laws can't be easily written and understood, that's a problem with the legal system (and the media explaining said laws and initiatives).

The CA implementation seems terrible, but in general direct democracies end up with better laws, and the populace in such democracies ends up being better than a bunch of self selected politicians (who happen to not be experts anyway). US and UK lawmaking processes are a perfect example of why you need to give citizens more control (but you still want legislative bodies to do the grunt work).

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Re:California Eyes Data Privacy Measure by duxup on Monday May 28, 2018 @05:16PM (#17174895)

"but in general direct democracies end up with better laws"

Is there something that indicates that?

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Re:California Eyes Data Privacy Measure by _red on Monday May 28, 2018 @07:55PM (#17175483)

>If laws can't be easily written and understood, that's a problem with the legal system (and the media explaining said laws and initiatives).

Do you write code by chance? Ever introduce a bug or unintended consequence? I bet 10-1 it was logic problem, not a compiler problem.

The hard part of writing laws is in exactly and completely defining your terms. It has nothing to do with the legal system, and more to do with the nature of language itself.

Gödel's 'incompleteness theorems' comes to mind.

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