"Solve this problem perfectly right now with no edge cases whatsoever, or it's not even worth discussing." The go-to mantra for opposing any complex proposed change. You know, lots of issues in society can't be solved perfectly or on the first try, should we do nothing about those too?
There are laws based on ambiguity and discretion, you know. Those seem to work. How about we get anything in place and iron out the kinks later instead of resigning on step one? Making the idea of retaining irrelevant private data even slightly toxic to businesses will already have a chilling effect where your parking app or grocery store will think twice before stuffing every corner of their hard drives with terabytes of surveillance data.
And discretion, tests, broad adjectives - that's just the last resort of the legal system. I think that the terms can be defined much more concretely in reality by someone who knows more than me about law. Ask 100 anti-surveillance advocates to choose examples of surveillance from a list and I guarantee that most of them will agree on most answers. Do you believe there's a limitation of reality that prevents the drafting of a law that encompasses at least 90% of the points that people are able to agree on? Can we not distill the actions that make them think 'this is surveillance, but this isn't' into a list of rules?
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"Solve this problem perfectly right now with no edge cases whatsoever, or it's not even worth discussing." The go-to mantra for opposing any complex proposed change. You know, lots of issues in society can't be solved perfectly or on the first try, should we do nothing about those too?
There are laws based on ambiguity and discretion, you know. Those seem to work. How about we get anything in place and iron out the kinks later instead of resigning on step one? Making the idea of retaining irrelevant private data even slightly toxic to businesses will already have a chilling effect where your parking app or grocery store will think twice before stuffing every corner of their hard drives with terabytes of surveillance data.
And discretion, tests, broad adjectives - that's just the last resort of the legal system. I think that the terms can be defined much more concretely in reality by someone who knows more than me about law. Ask 100 anti-surveillance advocates to choose examples of surveillance from a list and I guarantee that most of them will agree on most answers. Do you believe there's a limitation of reality that prevents the drafting of a law that encompasses at least 90% of the points that people are able to agree on? Can we not distill the actions that make them think 'this is surveillance, but this isn't' into a list of rules?