Privacy Please

Our lawmakers are too busy opposing each other meanwhile the protections they are supposed to be doing for Americans are not even close to the advancements the Europeans have done to protect their citizens privacy and personal information. Big teck companies that we use and rely on daily own Americans and hold us hostage with their disclosures of terms and conditions that we have to agree to in the fine print or we can’t use their devices we all rely on. Where are our rights to own our information? Why aren’t they asking us permission to use our information? In Europe there are laws that we don’t have. Why?

The companies here have no intention of supporting a privacy law that would actually stop them from collecting our information and give Americans the same rights that Europeans have. I’m talking about Google, Facebook and Amazon that are big companies that we all rely on now in our daily lives for information, goods and services and even friends. When I spend a thousand dollars on a phone, I can’t even use anything on it until I agree to the terms and conditions on every app. Those agreements that restrict you from using the site or device is essentially blackmailing you for permission to virtually own all there is to find about you without your knowledge. They probably know more about you than you even know! How the hell did our lawmakers allow this breach of privacy to happen in America?

In America your data is NOT your data. These big companies have been able to increase their profits by knowing everything about you. Europe is the world leader in internet privacy and data protection. There they have enacted a new law to stop marketing personal information for advertising to Google and Facebook. In this information age, data is the most important commodity. The question is who does it belong to? In Europe you have control over your information and big companies have to ask you for permission. In America we are held hostage and can’t even use our sites or devices unless we agree to their terms and conditions. Hey Congress and Mr. President protect us on line globally and not just with or without a stupid wall at a border.

The European law is called The General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR that forces every company even the big companies to comply with the fact that folks have sole control over their personal information. There folks can access everything and ask big shots like Google, Amazon and Facebook for a copy of everything they have collected on you including deleted personal conversations. In an information society we should have the power over our information and not them. Americans have NO control about the information collected about them. The only Americans guaranteed privacy protection are children under the age of 13.

There are no rules, there is not a government agency and the companies can do whatever they want in terms of gathering anything they can find that we say, do, purchase and have opinions on. We don’t even know what the hell they will do with us in a file somewhere! Lawmakers in America! Please start doing something we really need! We need to own our identity again.