Rights do not have to be guaranteed by bulletproof technology in order to be valuable. We might not be able to guarantee that corporations never overstep the bounds we set, but the threat of a lawsuit can be a powerful disincentive.
From a certain POV, this is correct, and I don't disagree with the general aim.
Rights do not have to be guaranteed by bulletproof technology in order to be valuable.
Entirely correct. What's of more concern is that we not only have a general public, but an "expert" population of programmers and other technical workers that doesn't make decisions about these things in an informed rational way. This is why I get on the soapbox in support of trusted execution environments and point out how they can be used against the authorities.
the threat of a lawsuit can be a powerful disincentive.
But I would argue that the "trusting trust" problem encompasses not only privacy and security, but political power as well. When transparency itself is strictly voluntary and comes into competition with the temptation of money and great power, we've seen that such a deterrent loses some of its potency. The threat of a lawsuit also doesn't work as well against certain governments in certain contexts.
You may well be right that technology is a distraction, for now. The social and legal framework might be the thing to establish first.
But... a trusted execution environment would be no use if it wasn't mandated, so it is secondary to having rights enshrined in law.
And yes, there is a trust problem. But I think it would be very difficult to operate a massive data collection empire on the scale of Google or Facebook without at least one whistleblower exposing it.
In that case, you also need "altruistic DRM" -- otherwise private data gets into the wrong hands and bad actors do with it what they will. You're sounding like a loud disagreement in tone, but the words themselves actually spell out strong support for my idea.
Besides, so long so there is government, there can be no useful good actors unless they're untouchable trillionaires that are above the law.
Are you a good actor, and if so, how do you know?
Which probably also tells you that I think people are generally bad actors by nature. Due to greed & a lack of integrity when endowed with a position of power. Any systems designed with the notion that people are generally good actors tend to be exploited and corrupted over time.
"Are you a good actor, and if so, how do you know?"
Perhaps? I can't know that because I've never been in such a position that would reveal my lesser traits. I've never been given into logical fallacies under pressure from multitudes of bad actors that would love to see me fail so they could get what they want. Which is why I've commented before on why I think the government should be designed in a way that forces bad actors to be good actors by encouraging them to follow their natural instincts to be positively selfish instead of negatively.
Sure, your medical records are encrypted on disk (but I have the key in plaintext right next them).
Sure, there's an opt-out on our site. Good luck remembering to click the opt-out button in the corner every time you visit.
A government opt-out defaults database would partly address the 2nd objection. (Only partly)
Itβs time for a frank public discussion about how to make personal information privacy not just a series of check boxes but a basic human right, both online and off.
The problem is, is that there is no suitable infrastructure for guaranteeing such a right, and there is no one everyone trusts enough to implement it. To have this in actuality, we really need some sort of trusted execution environment. Unfortunately, this is the same thing as DRM, and we already know how manufacturers and big software companies might collude with the authorities to turn this against us.
In a way, this is a win-win for totalitarianism, big-data style. If the powers that be can implement DRM as they want, they control computing from the substrate-up and we've all swallowed the Blue Pill. However if the public has a vehement reaction against DRM, then the population is effectively inoculated against implementing such tools for themselves so they can hold authorities and website operators to account. Either way, the oligarchs/equity lords/0.01% win.
If you look at the activities of groups like the IRA, resistance has relied on the power of social networks in the oppressed population. Now, online social networks have embedded the structure of people's social networks in big data itself. That is a lot of aggregated power. Power corrupts.
EDIT: After engaging in the discussion below, I'll bend my position a bit. Such infrastructure would be nice (where "nice" = "really the only sane way to do it") but a social and legal framework to set expectations might be the pragmatic thing to go after first.