Vast, high-N, longitudinal studies of health trends can be a truly good use the kind of data that ubiquitous personal devices can collect.
Wouldn’t it be beautiful if we lived in a world where stringent, agressively enforced privacy law let us feel unequivocally good about the collection of this kind of data, knowing it is tightly monitored, anonymized at the source, and never ever ever misused? Wouldn’t that just be wonderful?
https://mastodon.social/@arstechnica/112530947654690520
I want a world where whenever some creep-ass Republican politician working to criminalize abortion demands data from period tracking apps so they can hunt down marginalized teenagers who got pregnant, the response is, “The technology makes that impossible, and federal law makes it so you’ll go to prison if you try.“
And just to be clear, it is well within the realm of possibility to write such code and (I think) such law. Neither the technical nor the legal is the obstacle here.
This is a political problem, in the broad sense of “political,” i.e. what people believe, which people have power, and how are society as a whole makes collective decisions.
@inthehands I'm going to argue that GDPR is more than half-way to such a law --- if enforced aggressively enough.
@fishidwardrobe
It’s certainly an effort in the right direction.
@inthehands On the legal side, I think to really do this in the US, you'd want to pass a constitutional amendment. Otherwise the authority of the federal government to prevent states from doing this is dubious (though the supreme court can kind of make up what they wish the constitution said, and claim it does). And a simple majority of congress could make an exception to this or repeal it whenever they want.
@inthehands I really think we need strong constitutional protections for digital privacy rights. But unfortunately I have trouble imaging that happening in the foreseeable future.
@ids1024 All it would take for that is Americans treating the fourth amendmend like they do the second. @inthehands