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9Local politics, the county, and the world, as viewed by Tammy Maygra Tammy’s views are her own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Bill Eagle, his pastor, Tammy’s neighbors, Wayne Mayo, Betsy Johnson, Brad Witt, Former President Trump, Henry Heimuller, Joe Biden, Pat Robertson, Ted Cruz, Joe Biden’s dogs, or Claudia Eagle’s Cats. This Tammy’s Take (with the exception of this disclaimer) is not paid for or written by, or even reviewed by anyone but Tammy and she refuses to be bullied by anyone. See Bill’s Standard Disclaimer
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Big Brother is watching you!
Current privacy laws do not fully protect our privacy rights, especially at a time when tech giants like Amazon, Meta, and Alphabet are buying up all our data. We currently have no federal privacy law and no baseline regulation that provides standardized protections for privacy across all 50 states.
Instead, we have a patchwork system of state laws and regulations that vary by industry, making it difficult for any company, giant or not, to fully comply with all privacy regulations.
Do we want these companies to have all our personal.info?
He'll no!
Even when most Americans believe at left their medical information is protected.
Guess what it isn't.
Amazon announced its plans to acquire iRobot, maker of the popular Roomba robotic vacuums, just weeks after the company announced it was acquiring One Medical, a tech-forward concierge medical company.
With the acquisition of companies that provide personal services, such as medical or in-home cleaning devices, for example, Amazon stands to obtain massive amounts of personal data, a valuable commodity in today’s climate. But it is baby steps in these companies controlling our lives.
In just under three decades, Amazon has grown from a scrappy e-commerce startup to a multifaceted corporate goliath. In addition to the e-commerce business that first launched Amazon into the tech stratosphere, Amazon now owns a number of subsidiaries, including Amazon Web Services, Ring and Whole Foods.
From a privacy standpoint, this means that Amazon already has direct access to vast quantities of consumer data, from your Whole Foods shopping history to your Amazon Prime watchlist to raw video fed directly from Ring cameras installed on your (or your neighbor’s) front door.
Acquisitions of more companies and services will only lengthen its reach into consumers’ personal lives. iRobot’s home cleaning products include smart vacuums and mops that can map out the layout of your entire home. When combined with Amazon Echo’s always-on voice assistants, plus Ring’s video surveillance, Amazon will soon have the potential to be fully enmeshed in every part of your home.
Think about it, it’s a sneaky way to take over control of your life and you don't even know it because you love your gadgets.
For example, in the health care industry, you might have heard of HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. However, what you might not know is that HIPAA is incredibly limited and only protects certain kinds of health information when electronically transmitted in scenarios involving a select category of health care provider. HIPAA is not a broad regulation that protects health privacy in all cases.
There are also exceptions to HIPAA that allow law enforcement to access to medical records, something that came up recently in a Nebraska case in which law enforcement obtained access to records from Facebook and from a health care provider in order to prosecute a teen and her mother for performing an at-home abortion.
Recently, both Sens. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., separately called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the One Medical deal for potential antitrust violations. It’s true that the FTC and the Justice Department should look into these Amazon deals for anti-competition reasons, as Amazon continues to consolidate its market power across sectors.
Amazon’s recent acquisitions not only raise issues of market competition and power imbalance; they also highlight privacy risks we cannot ignore any longer. Our current privacy regulatory regime is not enough to protect our fundamental right of privacy. We need comprehensive privacy legislation on a federal level, and we need to make sure that any new federal privacy law includes special protections for sensitive categories of data, including personal health information. We also need legislative protection against government abuse of access to consumer data to protect against unreasonable searches that violate our constitutional right to privacy. The more of our private data these tech giants own, the more they will be able to invade our privacy. The more this happens, the more we also begin to expect that our privacy will be invaded.
Over time, we normalize these privacy violations, so much so that eventually, our society stops believing in privacy. By not protecting privacy today, we may risk losing privacy forever.
People need to be outraged and wake up and demand that we legislate laws to protect our privacy before this intrusion gets any more intrusive... Or maybe, we get rid of all these useless gadgets, that we really don’t need.
Tammy
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