It almost certainly won’t be enacted in its current form but US Senator Ron Wyden has introduced a privacy bill with some real teeth. Among other things it calls for significant jail time for CEOs and other executives who lie to the FTC about their snooping.
As I’ve said before, fining the corporations doesn’t work because they merely write the fines off as a cost of doing business. Fining the executives directly probably wouldn’t work either because, one way or another, the fines would be paid by the corporations. Jail time is different. The corporation can’t serve an executive’s sentence; it’s an entirely personal cost payable only by the perpetrator.
Sadly, even privacy groups—who have widely praised Wyden’s bill—admit that its chances of passage are slim because of the powerful forces arrayed against it. Facebook and Google, of course, are adamantly opposed to such legislation but so are other powerful corporations that collect and sell our information.
Wyden’s bill would allow individual consumers to opt out of having their information collected. To companies like Facebook and Google, that’s an existential threat. Imagine if Facebook were prohibited from collecting its users’ information without their permission and that Zuckerberg could go to jail for ignoring the ban. How long would Facebook stay in business? Probably not very long, at least not with their current business model.
The good news about the bill is not that it will pass. It probably won’t, although I very much hope it will. Its real effect is more apt to be felt as a wakeup call to those abusing our privacy. If the bill is hard to defeat and costs the lobbyists a lot of money, perhaps the abusers will dial back their behavior a bit. Or not.