How we can curtail surveillance capitalism in one move
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is finally taking aggressive measures against some personal data brokers, hopefully signaling a more decisive approach against an industry that violates privacy, generating all kinds of problems, including psychological disorders, among certain demographics.
Shutting down a company that sells people’s geolocation data, whether that of minors or not, is not simply a matter of justice: it is common sense, because this business should never have been able to exist in the first place. As a harmful activity that violates basic human rights, it should have illegal all along.
If the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and its equivalents in most developed countries protect citizens from the arbitrary search or seizure of their persons, houses, papers and effects secure, how can companies, without any apparent restriction, spy on everything we do online, as well as well as by monitoring our telephones, purely for commercial interests?
In the future, when we study the evolution of human societies, the current era of absolute freedom with respect to the trafficking of personal data will be seen as a gross aberration, a Wild West of utter lawlessness. The managers of the large technology companies that engaged in this activity will be the bad guys, the black hats who…
