iugtmkbdfil834 parent
And once there is a cottage industry in place and money is rolling, any attempt to adjust by privacy conscious portion of the population will be neutered or overruled by aggressive lobbying. And that is assuming the amoral entities having access to all that data won't attempt to use it to put a finger on a scale.
And the lobbying dollars will go twice as far because the existence of the industry benefits the government. Whereas a normal industry has to fight an uphill lobbying battle where the courts and enforcers and legislators extract the maximal pound of flesh at every step the government will bend over backward to make it go easy for the privacy invasion industry.
The only ways these status quos change is when people hate the industry so much that being in bed with it threatens the reelection of the politicians and the legitimacy of the institutions can the tide shift.
So true.
It's so clear to me now that it was foolish to go after the government for what was, at root, a problem emanating from private industry practices. That was unimaginably dumb. It's clear the issue was obviously the private industry practices the whole time. Those practices are what we should have been trying to stamp out from the start.