I think you missed the point? You're putting a price on people's privacy. Not everyone who feels their privacy is being violated really wants payment in exchange, they just don't want their privacy to be violated.

Ah, I was looking at it from a system level. Make it a highly lopsided financial cost for a company to use data that hasn't been consented to, and the huge number of people keeping tabs on them would make it financially ruinous for a company to try and skirt the rules.

End outcome is the same - peoples privacy already has a price. That price is just currently only represented by FAANG profits.

> Ah, I was looking at it from a system level. Make it a highly lopsided financial cost for a company to use data that hasn't been consented to, and the huge number of people keeping tabs on them would make it financially ruinous for a company to try and skirt the rules.

So you want to make it so only rich companies can do this? Or is the idea to make it so that only the juiciest targets end up becoming victims, because their consent doesn't matter? If you care about data privacy and are looking at it at a "system level", why in the world would you not just completely outlaw nonconsensual data collection? And force a company that violates the law to heavily pay and remove all traces of the data so that it's closer to "infinite cost", instead of permitting them to just keep everything and treat the $100 fine as a cost of business?

> End outcome is the same - peoples privacy already has a price. That price is just currently only represented by FAANG profits.

Same as what? Making it outright illegal? No it's not, with your scheme you're explicitly giving them permission without people's consent, instead of preventing them from doing it in the first place.

In the US the civil courts dole out rulings requiring the injured party be paid by the offender when enough evidence has been presented. It’s not perfect-money can’t right all wrongs and the valuations can be problematic-but it can act as a counterbalance. Making it a law would mean a company would risk losing their ability to continue as a business following a successful conviction. In the US this has been turned into rarely indicting companies as the government doesn’t want to destroy whole companies that way and give other companies undue market power, or something.

Feels like an area that could be handled better.

There is a certain mindset that unfortunately has been ever more widely 'bought into' and is especially highly represented at the top levels of corporations in recent years* (particularly in the US). The mindset is fundamentally "invisible hand", "Adam Smith", "Ayn Rand", etc. People who mostly or nearly only think in terms of costs, profits, etc.**

The easiest way to deal with people like this is by putting it in 'the language' they speak. While I'd love, personally, to see some direct regulation, legislation, etc. that doesn't involve turning this into yet another line 'in the books' / in the annual reports etc. of companies ... and feeds, arguably, even more into that sort of thinking ... for multiple reasons there are extensive practical issues with doing that in the US currently. It'd certainly be helpful in the longer term if we could get some people away from viewing everything through the lens of numbers - especially conflating OTHER PEOPLE with "format strings" in Excel (effectively). But, I believe in being practical along with strategic. If such metrics are needed, private-party lawsuits are needed ... if government (outside of perhaps putting some basic accounting in place &/ the justice system and current tort laws) is not an option for sorting out disputes and correcting bad behavior, particularly some forms of traditional government regulation, and the bottom-line is king ... then let's use what is available or might be put in place, ultimately speaking the 'language' necessary to push things in a more reasonable direction.

* Not uniformly distributed, for sure, but increasingly visible on average - in part, thanks MBA programs, but also, somewhat relatedly, decades of work and marketing from people who really want to turn the clock back ... wannabe robber-barons (https://youtu.be/DqgvHUg_vxY) and even those with plantation 'wetdreams'

** Incidentally, this is related to the kind of "mob rule" that outright dangerous politicians like Trump represent. Importantly, dangerous to EVERYONE, even those in the cult, though they almost certainly don't know the true extent of the danger, even remotely. In essence, without any principles / rule of law established in notions like actual justice, truth, fairness, equitable treatment, etc., any forces driving large systems involving people will tend to devolve into forms of mob rule. Whether it's markets for goods and services, the "marketplace of ideas", etc.

What is more and more absent in America, in particular, in public discourse especially, but also in certain business sectors of, in some cases, outsized importance in this entire 'picture', is the kind of principled viewpoints, ideas, thinking, etc. that have repeatedly re-formed this country at those critical moments when it might have broken / not become the exemplar that it often has been. Whether that happens this time as well remains to be seen, I think.

That's a massive topic ... all of this is ... and I am really no expert in much of this, so caveat there, but, I have enough of a sense and of the details of history and the differences in outcomes at different times and in different places to offer the commentary I am right now. More importantly, regardless of some of the background / mechanisms, the actual behaviors are clear enough in recent times / events / data. I.e., what I've written outside of these footnotes.

No comment on your larger point, but I fail to see any evidence that the 'language' is the problem, or that speaking in "fines" is a solution. In fact, I see quite the opposite - we've seen repeatedly that corporations treat fines as cost of business. Moreover it's not like data collection was ever outlawed, so I don't see the motivation to give up immediately and jump to a fining model. If anything, sanctioning things via fees could very well cement the practice in even more, and make it harder to outlaw entirely.