The Problem: Deterioration of Privacy
Most people do not know how much of their lives is being quietly collected, cross-linked, sold, scored, and stored. Your car can become a mobile telemetry device. Your child's school has a wealth of data spread through untrustworthy vendors including health records, birth certificates, videos, photos. Companies can scrape your movements, habits, devices, family, purchases, and routines until they can predict where you go, who you know, what you fear, and what you might do next. It's gone from merely name and city being publicly available to a shadow profile of a plethora of your data, to an extent one cannot comprehend.
And it is getting worse. Society's expectation was that a photo could be taken of you, your car, your family out in public, but the likelihood until recently approached zero. License plate reader systems can turn normal travel into a searchable movement history. Surveillance companies are scraping and cataloging faces, and where and when those photos were taken. Private actors are building a dataset including yard signs, bumper stickers, and other devices meant for neighborhood expression, not databases. Governments can buy data from brokers that they would otherwise need a warrant to obtain. Together, these systems create an ever-growing dossier of private life that can be exploited by corporations, data brokers, contractors, and the state.
This is all un-American. America is a nation of free people, not watched people. Warren and Brandeis perceived that the gravest injuries are not always physical. The law rightly condemns the invasion of the body -- battery. It should no less condemn the invasion of the private life, the disturbance of the mind, the humiliation of exposure, and the slow theft of the right to be let alone.
The Solution: A Comprehensive Privacy Bill
The bill imposes hard limits on surveillance, hidden collection, coercive “consent,” brokered data trafficking, and government circumvention of what should be a lawful process balancing freedom with evidence of wrongdoing. It restores rule-based protections people can understand and courts can enforce.
- Ban broad commercial surveillance and sharply restrict data brokerage.
- Control over your data, protections for children’s, medical, biometric, genetic, location data.
- Protect victims of abuse, domestic violence to remove their likeness.
- Opt-in for everything. Choice for 'this call may be recorded.'
- Limitation of government drones.
- Stop forced ID uploads when safer alternatives exist.
- Update CAN-SPAM for one-click deletion of email addresses from databases.
- Physical and digital switches for automobile cellular connections.
- Limit government purchase of private-sector data.
- Block private searchable databases of plates, yard signs, and expression designed for community.
- Require local-first surveillance architecture instead of cloud-hosted mass tracking.
- Framework for state DMV to include with ID two-factor authentication and digital ID information.
- Require Social Security Numbers to authenticate preventing fraud.
- US Mail Spam Control.
- Develop framework for TOTP-inspired digital license plate.
- Security standard for surveillance cameras with notice from businesses the standard is in use.
- Serious civil enforcement and criminal penalties.
“Recent inventions and business methods call attention to the next step which must be taken for the protection of the person, and for securing to the individual what Judge Cooley calls the ‘right to be let alone.’”
This project is a work in progress. People are encouraged to review the draft, suggest edits, and write tests that are run through LLMs to check whether the bill behaves as intended in real-world scenarios.