"Many people’s first reaction to being asked about the U.S. government’s role in monitoring internet content is the very reasonable conclusion that they certainly have a duty to do so for those who are on a list of some sort from either committing a crime or having ties to an organization that has a history with committing crime. Everyone can surely come to agreement that they should not track every U.S. citizen because it is an extreme waste of resources and tax dollars and a violation of due process. However, there's another, less obvious, face to the problems that result from a lack of the expectation of privacy over the Internet.
The White House proposed the consumer privacy “bill of rights”. This bill was intended to prevent web services such as Google from collecting your information and selling it to a third party without giving you the ability to opt-out and without giving you the ability to review what kind of information they're giving to these third parties. This was a really important proposal as it was one of the few that, had it succeeded, would have been a huge success for consumer rights.
If this …show more content…
For example, you get a discount and they get to sell your information generically, not identifying you, etc. That’s a deal you could make that’s fair because then you have consensual agreement. I hope that would be the model they go to, I liked this bill that would have protected us. Normally I am on the side of the Internet companies, but in this case I am not because they are the ones intruding into our privacy. But Facebook, for example, will pay a ridiculous amount of money to make sure this bill, and others like it, never go into effect. This goes back to the same issue of citizens united, we need to make sure that different companies, corporations, do not have the ability to do that, because then we’re not going to get any real