Yeah, most charitably, it seems to be some sort of an LLM art project. And it's another day when we engage with slop because it happens to say something we like.

As opposed to bills sponsored by real people that completely decimated privacy? Patriot Act? I’ll take slop that has some semblance of reasonable privacy protection any day.

The impacts of the model that BigTech currently follows closely resemble those of product dumping. Effectively banning that model would mean alternative subscription based platforms would stand a much better chance of succeeding than they currently do.

a) It wouldn't kill them. They would have to change their business model though.

b) Shouldn't our laws prioritize natural-persons over corporate desires?

Companies don't have a right to a specific revenue model. Humans should have a right to their own identity.

How is paying for a product instead of being the product a bad thing?

nonsense.

You could have a mail client with a static banner ad at the top.

You delete the rest of your spam database and replace it with `fn can_send_spam(_: Email) -> bool { false }`. You delete the "can we spam you" checkbox from your checkout page and replace it with "return false".

For legitimate newsletters and similar: you delete any and all forms that allow signing up to receive emails without affirmative consent from that email address that they want to receive mail, and you offer a one-click effective-immediately "unsubscribe" to retract that consent at any time. Then, you can tell if you can send someone mail based on whether they're in your database of people who have explicitly consented to send you mail, and you don't ever send email to anyone else other than one-time consent requests and order-confirmation-style transactional mail.

The only legitimate database of emails is "these people have explicitly confirmed to us that we can email them"; any other database is radioactive waste, delete it.

Wouldn't a hash work great for this purpose? I.e.

1. User requests for email alice@example.com to be removed from database

2. Company removes "alice@example.com" from 'emails' table

3. Company adds 00b7d3...eff98f to 'do_not_send' table

Later on, the company buys emails from some other third-party, and Alice's email is on that list. The company can hash all the email addresses they received, and remove the emails with hashes that appear in their 'do_not_send' table.

You'd have to normalize the emails (and salt the hashes), but seems doable?

The bill text is at https://github.com/righttoprivacyact/bill/blob/main/bill/rig...

It contains following:

> (i) Finance and high-risk identity proofing.—No person shall extend credit, originate a loan, open a high-risk financial account, or provide another high-risk financial service based solely on a Social Security number, static identity information, or an uploaded image or copy of a government-issued identity document. A person engaging in such activity shall use multi-factor identity verification reasonably designed to verify both record consistency and claimant control, using less intrusive reasonably reliable methods where available.

> (j) Social Security number not sufficient identity credential.—A Social Security number, taxpayer identifier, or similar identifier shall not by itself be treated as proof of identity for purposes of this Act.

So, to me at least, it sounds like they actually mean "Providers must not use SSN for authentication (including fraud)".

It will probably accomplish nothing for other reasons. There are secret laws in this country which violate the constitution. I don't think the average person appreciates privacy as much as they should. But saying they are complicit in the making of this mess is going way too far. There are not so many choices in tech as you think. The most private ones require high technical expertise, and involve risks other than those presented by corporate tech. For example, you may have to trust a small number of unpaid individuals (who may even be anonymous) to deliver software.

You are saying exactly, and I mean exactly, what they would want.

Dismissing an avenue of progress outright is to be defeatist or to sow defeat.

AI is going to use all this information against us. Because AI alignment can’t be better than people and corporations deploying the AI.

Lack of privacy is now a gaping security hole, being continually exploited on all our devices, across most sites on the internet.

[EDIT: And the leverage that information enables is being auctioned off to manipulators who we are exposed to continuously. This is just the beginning.]

We need to plug this security hole now, before power centralizes further and we can’t.

> too much money on the other side to let this gain traction

This view is unfortunately common among regular privacy advocates. That makes them politically useless.

To have a hope, this bill needs to target support outside tech, where civic laziness and nihilism are normalized. I’m not seeing any indication of that strategy here.