Earlier quoted context omitted.
People don't have a choice about giving information to governments. There's a fourth amendment for a reason so I'm obviously anti dragnet. Private parties though may opt into providing anything legal to other private parties at their sole discretion and that's the nature of things. Despite the fact that the majority of Americans are making market choices that many of us would consider "not privacy respecting", that d…
If there were proper protections in place to protect privacy it doesn’t matter whether the violator is a government or commercial enterprise. Secondly, the courts have repeated ruled that the fourth amendment has nothing to do with privacy.
Legislative privacy protections make it impossible for you to sign certain things away contractually and/or make it impossible for someone else to ask you to do so contractually. The right to sell certain data to certain people at certain times, even if you have consent from the user, for example, can render a contract void. Of course legally limiting the things you can agree to in this way would limit the effect of these contracts. Don't sign shitty contracts though and you can get all of this today.
The government isn't bound by optional contracts though and as long as congress grants the government jurisdiction over everything not constitutionally interpreted to be covered by the fourth, government snooping is completely legal.
I agree with you. Congress should limit the government's data mining jurisdiction, but it seems hellbent on doing the opposite with things like PATRIOT, PRISM and wiretapping legislation. I think users should also stop being flagrant idiots with their data if they supposedly care about it so much. Users can effect change in the market by deciding not to do business with bad business practices. Meta says it's going to mix WhatsApp data with Facebook data and people boycotted, Meta backtracked (for awhile)... more of that, we can do both.
> Secondly, the courts have repeated ruled that the fourth amendment has nothing to do with privacy.
Privacy from whom? The fourth sets a bar for "unreasonable" searches of an individual by requiring a warrant for public access to "persons, houses, papers, and effects". The government can still ask you for information without a warrant and definitely will ask Google for information about you, which does not itself need to demand a warrant on your behalf. As stated above, everything that isn't explicitly enumerated as protected is fair game as well.
The constitution curtails the relationship between the government and the governed. The fourth says nothing about privacy from other private entities, corporate or otherwise.