Tim May wrote: > Much of the basic "there should be laws to protect our privacy" > arguments are so ill-founded and anti-liberty as to not be worth > discussing. > > "What if my neighbor remembers something I told him last year? Don't > I _own_ that information he is telling to others? There ought to be a > law!" from a country that HAS privacy laws (germany): german privacy law applies only to business or state-owned organizations, not to individuals. it also only covers automated data collection or use. so if you tell the sales person something, you can't stop him from telling it someone else. you CAN stop him from entering it into your customer data. the law is comparibly simple (for a law), yet quite fine-grained. it's not a new law either, and works quite well. personally, the best part of it is psychological: you as the customer know that you have rights. for example, you can ask a company to delete your customer data after you have stopped doing business with them. or you can tell them to not sell your data to anyone else. you also have the right to learn what they store about you, and demand corrections if the data is wrong. I think this is reasonable and a far cry from the "mami, I want a law!".
