Great post. I've always felt that the best method to get actual privacy laws passed is to start monitoring and exposing politician and regulator data at scale. If some journalist can pay a few hundred quid to a data broker to find out the cell traffic data of everyone who visits the US Capitol, Rayburn House Office Building and the Hart Senate Office Building, and ties lobbyist visits to specific Congressional members, that would be _very_ interesting, and might motivate some solid action on blocking data brokers.
Great post. I've always felt that the best method to get actual privacy laws passed is to start monitoring and exposing politician and regulator data at scale. If some journalist can pay a few hundred quid to a data broker to find out the cell traffic data of everyone who visits the US Capitol, Rayburn House Office Building and the Hart Senate Office Building, and ties lobbyist visits to specific Congressional members, that would be _very_ interesting, and might motivate some solid action on blocking data brokers.
Thanks! Bringing the problem home to elected officials is a really fun idea. Given that there's often a detailed record of their public appearances, you'd think it'd be reasonably easy to tie individuals to their devices. There's a really fun example with celebrities here: https://web.archive.org/web/20141024013248/http://research.neustar.biz/2014/09/15/riding-with-the-stars-passenger-privacy-in-the-nyc-taxicab-dataset/
Suspect this was your point, but this sort of tactic has a pretty good track record for getting privacy legislation passed! https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-131/the-video-privacy-protection-act-as-a-model-intellectual-privacy-statute/