We already have laws that abridge the freedom of speech, so it's not absolute.

What's special about slander that we can have a say "you're not allowed to make defamatory false statements about people," but we couldn't have "you're not allowed to spy on people and sell information about them"?

Granted slander is a civil and not criminal matter, but if I could sue companies for sharing personal information about me that would still be something.

> Would the new amendment apply to the government, or to private sector, or to individuals?

It depends on how it's written, but there are no inherent limits here. You can make it do either.

> In any case, the 1st and the 28th? would continually be butting heads, since the 1st prohibits congress from passing laws that would enforce the 28th

Amendments, by definition, amend the constitution, as it was prior to them (meaning with all the previous amendments applied) so a later amendment can always override an older one explicitly, and even if it doesn't do so, the plain intent of the new amendment would likely suffice.

The fun part about amendments you can write that into the amendement and it can say whatever you want. There is no special expceptions, it defines what legal government and persons actions are by definition. The only problem (good thing imo) is it takes 2/3 to approve it which is a mountain of opposition. Complex Amendements suffer immensely from this since they have much more power than laws congress passes. But honestly privacy could probably be ensired easier with a law from congress. It is a right but perhaps starting with a law would actually be easier than an amendment nothing stops the government currently from have laws about privacy if there is an objection the escape hatch could be granted by an amendment

id see a limitation on the government to limit or remove liability for private entities to invade privacy.

private corps could still invade privacy, but they wouldnt be able to shrug the liability from torts related to their bad activity.

eg. the government can not remove liability to any behaviour that breaks the constitution, as thats the government brraking the constitution by deputizing somebody else to break it

I suggest that the new amendment make it illegal for devices to track us.

Cameras, microphones, computers, robots, algorithms, etc would not be able track people. Those are in-animate objects, not people, and shouldn't have any rights, especially the right to intrude on people's privacy.

Individuals would not be able to leverage such devices for power, influence or other selfish raesons.

Only another person, a real human, can watch you in public. Even take notes on you. Like a doctor. Or the employees of a grocery store.

You can have privacy and an institution can collect data.

HIPAA is an example of that.

All personal data should be treated with at or near HIPAA levels of security. If I give my personal information to my bank, or google, that's fine for them to look at it, but it's not ok if that information magically lands in the hands of Coca Cola for marketing.

> This is simply untenable. Institutions of all kinds have been keeping records connected to individuals for millennia.

This is the reason privacy is needed.

> Try to run a school when you can’t maintain data on the students.

Yes, we should try this. Zero-knowledge proofs and other modern technology allows for this. Even the first step of not selling or using student data for commerce is an easy step.

Those who think that we should not try to improve because our privacy is already compromised, should step aside.

It's not - GDPR does that and it could even be much stricter still and we'd be fine.

And even if you prefer to view the constitution as primarily setting up restrictions on government power, I think most of us here would agree that the at-scale data collection and surveillance our government performs under the guise of national security is an incredible power that is new and novel enough to warrant a discussion on keeping it in check.

The federal government a) saves everything, b) is constantly trying to attack encryption, c) tries to insert backdoors in hardware, and d) otherwise gives itself the means to spy on citizens and aliens alike. Even though we fight and have won, it’s been pyrrhic. I’m tired of constantly having the battle every time a new generation forgets why privacy is important.

I can’t imagine ways in which an amendment asserting every citizen’s innate ownership over their digital footprint, data sovereignty, etc. could be a misuse of the constitution. “No government shall abridge access to secure and private communication technology. No government shall collect or persist a profile of any citizen except as required to serve justice. No government can compel decryption of private data. Etc…”

It's not impossible. It just raises risk and thus borrowing rates to compensate. That has a dragging effect on the economy and brings up an important question: Are there rights we're willing to give up for money? For a lot of people, perhaps yourself the answer is yes. For others there's no price on their rights - they're not for sale.

I am not convinced mortgages is a net benefit to the society in any way.

And?

Good points, but there should be partial solutions. For example, you can present data about the consumer in order to decide on the mortgage, but once the transaction is complete, the data should disappear. You need something akin to "the data can be used only for the particular purpose of the transaction at hand, and the data must be wholly necessary for the transaction at hand."

We also know that mortgage lenders use irrelevant---well, scratch that---protected data to make decisions (i.e. discriminatory). Race for example is not supposed to be used in lending decisions.

Fraud detection can probably be solved by other reasonable means. And in any case, if you take the fraud argument to the limit, then you'd end up advocating for constant surveillance to prevent fraud. Equifax, Experian, and Transunion are all horrible companies who do their ostensible job minimally well, while maximizing the exploitation of the data of the people.

The constitution applies to government, yes. But it's predicated on an enumeration of inalienable human rights that need to be recognized and defended. That's what makes our government different from other instances of government. The enumeration of rights sets the stage for what we value as a society. And privacy is sorely missing from the modern dialog.

I'm sympathetic to the idea that the right to privacy in the digital age is fundamental enough that it needs to be distinguished in our founding documents and elevated to a level on par with the freedom of expression in more than just case law. Most importantly, the government shouldn't be able to spy on citizens either. Right now it does. This has implications for encryption law too.

The point of an amendment is to establish the axioms upon which we evaluate all future laws. From there we can build a legal framework that applies similar ideas to the private sector, as and where appropriate.

> airlines charge more if you're too large to fit your seat

I don't think this is a good example, because you're literally using more of the product that's being sold. I get where you're coming from but this one doesn't seem to really reinforce the point you are trying to make. It's like selling by weight or something if you wanted to compare it to groceries.

There is charging more because your costs are higher (most of your examples), then there is charging more because of opportunism. Insurance is customized because the costs are higher. That's fine.

Taking advantage of your personal circumstances that is unrelated to cost to charge you more--especially when it is hidden from you--is what is bad and should be illegal.

If you take charging higher grocery prices for richer people to its furthest point, you could end up with a system where every item costs Y% of their assets and the utility of a dollar is reduced the more you have. In effect, this would eliminate the relative value of having more money. For example, eggs could be priced at 0.02% of total assets, which means a poorer person with $2000 pays 40 cents, and a richer person with $1M pays $200.

Now, would this go to its furthest point? Probably not, but it has the same, but smaller, effect of reducing the utility of money for richer people.

In some scenarios, this actually might make sense. For example, in Finland, they use the day fine system where traffic ticket fines are based on the violator's daily disposable income. It's useful because this is a scenario where you want the punishment to feel equivalent to all income levels.

For groceries, I don't think this should apply, because I think we would not want the act of purchasing food to equally punish all levels of wealth.

This really becomes a philosophical discussion of defining price gouging and immoral market techniques. Some are clearly gouging, such as charging 2x plane fares for someone who has to fly to a funeral, or tripling the price of supplies after a natural disaster. Some are less clear.

> If I'm selling to the wealthiest zip code, where the median house price is over $10M, should I be disallowed to charge higher prices?

I think so, because perhaps your costs to distribute those products is more too. But what I don't think you should be able to do is say, well your house was $50mm and your house was $1mm so you pay much more. Or you're wearing Air Force Ones so maybe your price is just a little more wink wink. It's a bit like hyper-targeted advertising versus general advertising.

> If I'm posting something for sale on Craigslist, and I don't put a price, is it OK if I quote different prices to different people who text me?

I think so as well. I don't see a problem with this - you don't know anything (maybe besides a green/blue text) anything about the buyer, how much they make, &c.

Not comparable. The markets can still charge wherever they want, but it needs to be priced per item and not per customer. In your house counterexample, you could set whatever list price you want.

How can price discovery work if everyone’s price is different? What downward pressure would even exist on surveillance-derived prices besides resale black markets? Societally, do we really want to further monetize the expansion of the mass surveillance state?

> If I'm selling to the wealthiest zip code, where the median house price is over $10M, should I be disallowed to charge higher prices?

Yes, you should be disallowed. Otherwise every online store will upcharge you based on IP. There can be exceptions for small businesses or individuals, but that's it.

> It can never be better for consumers. The only way a business would adopt this practice is if it leads to greater revenues. On average, that necessarily means worse prices for the average consumer.

That depends on the distribution of consumer incomes. Price discrimination (charging people more who can afford more) can be good for low-income customers.

>It can never be better for consumers. The only way a business would adopt this practice is if it leads to greater revenues. On average, that necessarily means worse prices for the average consumer.

Not necessarily. Look at airlines for example, which make heavy use of price discrimination. This allows them to offer a lower economy price to people who have less money, while subsidizing the flight by charging a higher price to business or luxury travelers.

If they were only allowed to offer one type of ticket at one price, it would mostly benefit richer passengers while pricing the poorest passengers out of air travel.

In the end this made news about how the surveillance economy works and should further freak people out about it. This helps long term I think.

Sometimes you get coupons mailed on your behavior. There is a story out there that Target has(had?) a pregnancy prediction score, and acted on that to send you coupons: https://verdict.justia.com/2012/02/28/should-target-tell-you...

Kroger's delivery service wasn't that bad at all, it was fantastic actually.

Of course, some things are too good to be true, they apparently lost hundreds of millions of dollars on the effort before closing it down earlier this year. At least they did in my area in January, my understanding is they ended it everywhere they didn't have a physical store presence.

I buy "pickup" orders online all the time through the store's app where you can also buy instacart delivery. It's still shopping online but there's no additional cost nor tip for ordering pickup.

Is that assuming Instacart/DoorDash? Click and collect or even delivery from grocery stores isn't nearly that bad, right? I thought it was pretty competitive.

For a lot of people their time and their effort is worth more to them than their money unless it is something they particularly enjoy doing themselves.