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.
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.