> The relevant facts are that the website owner voluntarily put the tracking code...

The civil discussion should now be about the punishment for that.

Regulation is required for handling people's data

The problem is that the government often requires the providers/counter-parties to collect the data, so that a regulator can check for systemic discrimination.

It's a two way street. The companies doing the targeting lose money if their models are inaccurate.

If it's an official government form, there's usually verbiage stating that knowingly and willingly falsifying information is considered perjury or some such wording.

On top of the GDPR/American concept of "it is all OK if there is consent" which applies to most organization, health related organizations face stronger HIPPA regulations in the US.

Damn near anything in business in the US is allowed with "opt in" where the opt in is literally the scene from Charlie and the Chocolate factory, including the part where you don't get to come after the factory for your death and dismemberment as stated in 1pt font after an entire chapter of reading to dull your attention.

easily 90+% of people are subject to tens of thousands of pages of contract terms they signed but don't know or understand. It's madness.

Only when Congress might be embarrassed. The VPPA exists so we can't find out what videos they watch in their spare time between orgies.

Very rarely. Most of the consumer protection laws were passed before Reagan in 1980. We did get the CFPB after the 2008 financial meltdown but it's been under attack ever since.

The point of the comment is to spread toxic and deadly cynicism.

Doesn’t really seem like the environment where the common persons going to get more rights or protections since the POTUS and SCOTUS are currently ripping those up while Congress sits in the cuck chair.

"Citizens" United (which allows unlimited corporate political donations by classifying them as "speech", for those out of the loop) has fundamentally changed the core incentive structures of the modern political landscape. To compare a pre-CU world to a post-CU world when it comes to matters at the intersection of corporate interests and government regulatory / legislative power is comparing apples to oranges.

We need to overturn CU if we want to be able to go back to a world where government serves people rather than multinational conglomerates.

And in some countries people are only given a choice of two, neither of which benefit the population.

In some countries a major party has succeeded in convincing a majority of voters to vote against their self interest by leveraging "red meat" topics such as abortion, jesus and guns.

Is that even possible in the US anymore with donations and corporate backing being so important to a campaign?

I would claim it's "better" these days than previously. At first, everyone thought they were getting something for free, no strings. Now it seems that even the "uneducated" public understands most of it...they just don't seem to care. The only one that people seem to be unaware of is the fairly precise location tracking that happens.

And also because they don’t realize how effectively that tracking data can be used to manipulate their emotions and behavior with the goal of squeezing out what money they do have.

It is not a perfect or rigid system, but it's the one we have (and any attempt to improve it would get caught up in the weeds of how much 'racial science' can be endorsed by the US government).

Practically speaking, most Americans over the past 300 years knew of specific near ancestors who came from somewhere else (with little interbreeding among immigrant populations) and answered based on that. The obvious exceptions were descendants of slaves and Native Americans, which is why those were the first non-white (where 'white' includes all Europeans as well as large parts of the Middle East and North Africa) categories tracked by the census.

They can pick "mixed" or the race they identify with the most.

I am European, I have had this discussion with Europeans back home from various countries. This is a common point of confusion. Do you have something to add?

No, not really. If you are not a covered healthcare entity, or a business association of a covered healthcare entity, the law simply does not apply to you at all.

Also, I believe (but am not certain) that if there was any criminal case, it would be leadership (C*O) not individual software engineers who would be charged. This is speculation on my part, if anybody has clear facts I'm happy to hear them.

You're referring to the privacy rule, which is only part of the law (and not its primary prupose). The original intent of the law was to ensure easy transfer of information to keep health coverage when changing jobs. The privacy rule was not even part of the original law, it was added by HHS 3 years later. See more details here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK9576/

You wouldn't need such a modern privacy rule if it weren't for the need for information portability in the digital age. The distinction between whether or not portability or privacy is primary in the law kind of doesn't matter. The real purpose of HIPAA was to help make the newly emerging market forms of health care sustainable. Protocol standardization and modernization of the Hippocratic Oath were both necessities, technical and ideological respectively.

That's not really correct. It was designed for portability- the ability to move data between health care providers.

(I work in healthcare-adjacent and have met with many lawyers and had to explain them all about "HIPAA compliance"; my comment was not made from ignorance, but practical experience based on learning about how the law is used. There is a privacy rule in it, but that was not the real intent of the law. The intent was to make it easy to keep your health care when you moved between jobs.)

Could you please cite the source for that quote? I looked for it, but couldn't find a source; it seems like an AI hallucination.

I wonder if that's why so many people write it as HIPPA.

"Ostensibly" is the mistake in your formula. Current events are replete with examples to the contrary. It's not equivocating to recognize that governments are organizations of humans, subject to the same limitations - the larger they get, the harder they are to manage well; talent is incredibly important to success in mission; leadership is incredibly important to integrity, ethics, and strategy; lower oversight and mediocre control structures lead to abuse. You can see the challenges that government as an organization has there. And as to scale..? Son. At least you can "ostensibly" choose whether or not to interact with corporations unless they are colluding with... government.