For example it is forbidden to take organs from people as payment. We could forbid taking certain private data from masses of people as payment.
If you are criticising that people are not willingly and knowingly entering into agreements with Facebook or Google, that is another debate. Yes I think there should be the utmost level of transparency and regulatory action on that front is justified in my view.
But telling people that they cannot trade access to personal data for access to services goes way beyond the role I think governments should have.
If that sort of thing is prohibited, how can a government allow its people to make any decisions that potentially affect their safety and their future, like choosing a career path, choosing a place to live, making decisions on health, education, kids, etc?
And now please explain to me what sort of voluntary agreement does not have negative externalities when it occurs en masse! Voluntary agreements inevitably create markets and markets have well known negative externalities. Even the democratic process itself has negative externalities. On that basis you can ban everything.
I'm not against all regulation, but your justification is way too general. It leads straight into authoritarianism.
The difference between that and seemingly "ordinary" data is that HIPAA data can be used against us unfairly.
I argue that's the case now, and we have proof it is already happening. You better bet your bottom dollar insurance companies and the likes are mining social media to charge different prices based on silly facebook posts
http://www.cnbc.com/2014/04/16/data-mining-is-now-used-to-se...
It's only a matter of time before police forces will begin to use these same techniques to "optimize policing"
We live in a different time now. Our data is not as harmless as it used to be. Hackers can attack various sources of services and build complete picture of peoples lives. Companies are using data mining techniques to leverage people's private interaction with friends and families against them. The worst part about it is -- it's complicated, and we have a technically inept Congress that barely understands the implications of all these technologies, and we will soon have a technically inept soon to be incumbent president, so these legal issues are not going to get any better.
this, plus what zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC mentioned, until we have the right to "be forgotten" or the ability to have our records completely purged after a period of time -- like you do with debt, like you do with criminal records, like you do with basically any public record, we will have these privacy issues. Right now if you want to purge false information about yourself on the internet, you have to go through hell and back (trust me, I've tried, Salon has had a completely fabricated story about me for almost 10 years now. I send an email every week asking them to redact my name from that article. Unless I seemingly spend hundreds of thousands to fight their legal arm, it's probably never going to change.)
I accept as a fact of modern life, that I unless I want to go be a hermit in the woods, I'll find myself entering into many contracts of adhesion that go against my ideals. And that as much as I try to limit this (not using facebook or whatsapp) I can't actually escape them entirely.
It is disingenuous to think that either (a) people fully understand and knowingly make the agreements they do w/r/t data or (b) do so willingly.
To draw the conclusion that it's just adults freely consenting in light of the previous paragraph is sophistry.
But if most people are in fact fine with granting access to their personal data in exchange for services then peer pressure on the rest of us who refuse the deal cannot be justification enough to ban the entire business model.
I'm in the same boat as you. I refuse to use Facebook.
