Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The law has been unable to keep up with tech changes. Nah, for the most part the law has been unable to keep up with (or choose to oppose) corporate power , and new ways it's being used. Usually there's no magic quantum doohickey which demands fundamentally new legal theory.
For example, take this TV spyware thing, and rewind to the year 1986, and imagine RCA started selling televisions with microphones in them that recorded what was in your room and radioed it back to headquarters for some reason. Obviously the costs wouldn't have worked at the time, but is there anything that was missing in our ability to describe the risks and wrongness? The concepts of privacy and consent, contracts…
The problem is that there are real use cases (whether you want them yourself or not) for having an always-on microphone that phones home. The discussion for regulators and lawmakers then becomes about how the data is handled, and that is where they get left in the dust.