Re:U.S. senators want social media users to be able to take ...
by emiliobumachar on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @12:26PM
(#21336211)
> Competition in the marketplace is good, but people are a society's priority. We can't lower the barriers to access on a user's private data in the name of, "this is good for business."
That's a reasonable position to take in the two joint discussions, but that's not "keeping the discussions separate", that's defining your priority and optimizing for it at the expense of other concerns. Dismissing those concerns because they are not important enough is fine, dismissing them as if they didn't belong to the discussion is dishonest.
I contest that the discussions are separable at all. The same regulation can be very good disregarding its effect as a barrier to entry, and very bad not disregarding it. Whether or not any particular regulation is good on net depends on pros and cons analysis that actually takes all relevant cons into account.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but letting marketplace needs influence who gets access to a user's data is how we got to this point in the first place. It's a separate discussion, and it needs to be kept separate. Besides, whatever people come up with in that regard, the commercial entities that want access to users' data can really have no reasonable objection to obtaining strict, explicit consent to access that data. With the concomitant legally binding and criminally enforceable rules attached.
Competition in the marketplace is good, but people are a society's priority. We can't lower the barriers to access on a user's private data in the name of, "this is good for business."