There are ways to personally escalate privacy rights accountability and enforcement with common means.
First, let me explain...
There are a lot of lawyers and scholars in Silicon Valley visibly chewing on how to hold corporate governance accountable. That’s all fine and great, but they’ve been doing that to negligible effect for over 15 years. Argument coming from Berkeley is privacy “self-regulation has been an abject failure”. The truth is companies who have a self-regulatory regime are far more accountable than the companies who don’t.
What isn’t quite being said is that most companies haven’t adopted self-regulatory regimes because of poorly adapted privacy and information security governance. It is poorly adapted for regulatory compliance due to the selective enforcement or government regulatory outcomes for online data infringements. Selective enforcement is due to the government business climate and capitol politics.
For example, political parties as non-profits are staffed to the gills with lawyers. They are private entities who claim responsibility for public interest. They are responsible for voter information. Many of their field campaign offices fail to protect voter or consumer information because it is readily sold by elections offices to their candidate campaigns. Information gathered by an elections office is still subject to the Privacy Act and regulations in the E-Government Act. Institutions, not unlike the DNC, license their lists, trade information, but lack an accountability structure and basic CISO governance for these exchanges. No data breach protocol. No insider threat protection. No nothing.
Since politicos already opted to overlook basic consumer protections as a matter of accepted commercial practice, information security is merely grist for the mill. Until, of course, facts, identities, e-mails and partisan custodial intelligence falls into the hands of an opponent they cannot control, like a foreign government.
The people in the nexus of government identity mandates: Social Security numbers, drivers, business licensees, all diverse forms and records-as-required by the government seem to be America’s “forgotten” in the political information works. Somewhere in this train is you.
Consumers are increasingly treated like interlopers when it comes to asserting their own interests and claim over their personal information with corporate data holders. To clarify, corporations are acting aggressively on behalf of government mass surveillance interests (i.e. Microsoft, Yahoo!, and AT&T ). Identity theft victims, in particular, feel most helpless about how aggressively the networked world treats them. Life becomes very difficult if you are treated as an imposter in your own transactional affairs.
Even when you’re not getting Hoovered into the National Security aperture or a Smart City botnet by government data holders, your information security prospects are still in a position of risk, especially if you are poor. Poor may be somewhat defined as persons who rely on a government agency for assistance with housing, food, education or other needs. The poor are required to produce exhaustive and invasive amounts of information to qualify for government aid. They don’t have money but they do have information.
This is also the subsidy strategy for the Internet’s freemium business model.
If you were to conclude that pro-surveillance partisans and Silicon Valley share, not just the same business designs and information base, but the same legal academics, the same financial stewards, the same whitewashed non-profit interests and the same PACs, I would say you're right.
Yes. Your individual privacy failure is their Palo Alto and Medina mortgage fodder.
Consumers will need much more personal recourse now and a knowledge base to help them self-advocate.
Consumers need self-advocacy now because:
- Non-profit advocacy groups don’t or won’t take the case or their efforts are stunted by political leveraging.
- Government accountability offices (FTC, Attorney’s General, PCLOB, OMB) won’t move on your complaint or place need of an attorney-at-work or political efficacy ahead of due diligence.
- Government accountability wheels move far too slowly to respond to your personal crisis.
- Government offices have an unfunctional, outdated or non-existent information security governance architecture. You’re better off not delegating any further personal information to them.
- Civil lawsuits are way out of reach if you are homeless or in dire economic straits. Discovery would expose your vulnerabilities further in a ‘pay-to-stay’ court system.
- Privacy is not insured by claims of helpful media pundits or the vicarious participation of expert scholars. It is only insured by the integrity of your personal efforts.
- Corporations ignore or combat personal requests to stop licensed use of personally identifiable information. They may put other non-lawful qualifiers to stop their actions, like a request of identity theft or DRM copyright infringement claim when it didn’t happen. If you submit to their request, you become a liar and your claim will not stand in court. They keep licensing your information.
- US permanent political class function as an adversary to the legal privacy rights of its constituents while staffing up privacy place holders to protect themselves from your lawsuits.
I can demonstrate guidance for people who have reached a personal crisis threshold between corporate and government authorities. I am willing to teach others at negligible cost for a limited time only.
If you are interested in personal privacy coaching or a privacy impact assessment consultation, I am making my services available to members of the general public and not just businesses, StartUps and law firms.
If you would like to teach privacy to people who are interested, I am interested in you. Community mentorship for privacy accountability will be vital for public and private accountability. We know the information space between the two occasionally merges against the interests and the will of the people. To even up the odds, I would help you for minimal cost as a way to innoculate community knowledge centers for personal privacy.
If someone interested in helping my public works connection security or you would like to be an information security sponsor – either as a co-instructor or as a infosec service provider, I would like to hear from you.
If you are a web or video media producer and you possess a high interest in the subject matter, I would provide you with content and guest instructors.
If you are a marketing maven and you would like to help monetize this effort to sustain it as a commercial opportunity for the future of individual privacy education needs and to actually make a buck, lets look at your sales work.
If you want privacy done right, you have to do it yourself. Let me help.
Use the contact form to be in touch.
SOURCES:
http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/yahoo-surveillance-microsoft-google/
https://www.wired.com/2015/08/know-nsa-atts-spying-pact/
http://www.networkworld.com/article/3123672/security/largest-ddos-attack-ever-delivered-by-botnet-of-hijacked-iot-devices.html
https://www.incapsula.com/blog/malware-analysis-mirai-ddos-botnet.html
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/rule-41-little-known-committee-proposes-grant-new-hacking-powers-government
http://www.housingwire.com/articles/38573-hud-inadvertently-exposed-personal-information-of-nearly-500000-individuals?eid=311694375&bid=1595299