A government?
Otherwise, why are there regulators for advertising or for food or government standards for anything?
I'm not talking about censorship or somehow evaluating the quality of content, I'm talking about if a company is delivering a service and I am paying for it, then the conditions under which they deliver that service should be regulated to ensure a fair and competitive marketplace.
Apple shouldn't be getting plaudits for making privacy a unique selling proposition.
All the other companies should be getting told that their business is unfair and exploitative. Privacy should be a right, the control of my personal information should be mine and consent to have it should be able to be withdrawn at any time.
Government requires thousands (literally) of people and political will in order to move any solution forward. In terms of cost and time, it is substantially less efficient than independent entities.
An independent entity could theoretically start immediately, with a small team, and focus explicitly on the stated goals of the team.
> Apple shouldn't be getting plaudits for making privacy a unique selling proposition.
Absolutely agree. The average citizen has no idea how hard they're being exploited.
> Privacy should be a right, the control of my personal information should be mine and consent to have it should be able to be withdrawn at any time.
Also agree, but the government has shown they have an interest in making that not happen. The ties between 3 letter agencies and large tech companies are just the tip of that iceberg.
In the UK the soil association is a private charity which mostly decides which food is "organic" and which food is not and it does a pretty good job. In the US, the USDA decides whether you can call your food organic and from what I understand it's kind of meaningless.
I think a private charity would work better here.
The formation of something new, and independent, means it would also be less susceptible to corruption.
Given that this is one of the primary purposes of governments, what do you suppose has been keeping them from stepping in so far?
Businesses are much faster at inventing ways to abuse people than governments are to regulate them away, even if we ignore lobbying and corruption.
Such a hypothetical organization we seek needs to be both swift and impactful. This automatically suggests some ties to government, as it's the best way to fulfill the criterion of impact. Not sure how to handle the "swift" part, though. Can't do it through regular market mechanisms, because ultimately price trumps all on mass market. The government reacts slowly for (among others) a good reason - while an unscrupulous businessman needs to invent just one weird trick, the government regulates away whole classes of tricks by default, and they need to take care to not outlaw perfectly legit new ideas.
"independent" is doing a lot of work here. Government regulators are, at least in theory, independent because they're paid from taxes collected, and have no incentive . What mechanism is supposed to keep the new 'independent' entity, actually independent?
It's not that a private entity can't do it - I largely trust the TÜVs and UL and other NRTLs for example. It's that most auditors - especially once you leave the "ship a physical product with verifiable physical properties" sector - instead look like E&Y, which I trust less than most of the companies they have audited.
You eventually need to have someone who will be substantially at risk if the audit is insufficient - "skin in the game" to use the modern idiom - controlling the audit. In the case of UL that's insurances companies (which are highly regulated by... the government), for other NRTLs it's the government directly.
