I think your general argument is a reasonable one if read in isolation. Unfortunately it seems quite possible that rayiner's characterisation of the law is correct, and that the law just happens to be bad and/or anachronistic in this area.
In general, I don't think privacy and data protection laws are anything like strong enough in most jurisdictions today, and I think the data mining industries (and governments) are pushing the boundaries of acceptable behaviour as far as they can as fast as they can so they can then claim that their behaviour is normal and accepted and therefore "OK" before those laws catch up.
The difficulty is that privacy is something of a Pandora's box situation -- once lost, it is almost impossible to truly restore -- with the added twist that it's mostly important to protect against "it would never happen to me" situations, which means the average person doesn't realise or doesn't care what they're losing until it is too late. I'm afraid the data miners will win (or already have won) and for at least one generation the safeguards that privacy should bring them have been lost for life.
Realistically, most people probably won't suffer great hardship as a result. The worst they'll get is some spammy advertising. The people we should worry for are the innocent ones who will nevertheless spend months trying to fix their credit after identity theft, or paying a fortune to accountants when they are investigated for (negligently) suspected tax fraud, or going through a hellish legal process for months to defend themselves against false accusations, or trying to get permission to travel on holiday after being put on some list because something they said was taken out of context, or having their candidacy for public office undermined by character assassination, or in the ultimate worst case who are dead because the SWAT raid/drone strike/other severe and immediate action left them no chance to set the record straight. These are among the reasons privacy and data protection really matter, but to the extent that anyone is really questioning laws and practices today they seem more hung up on Facebook and Google mining data to serve ads.
> trying to get permission to travel on holiday after being put on some list because something they said was taken out of context, or having their candidacy for public office undermined by character assassination, or in the ultimate worst case who are dead because the SWAT raid/drone strike/other severe and immediate action left them no chance to set the record straight. These are among the reasons privacy and data protection really matter, but to the extent that anyone is really questioning laws and practices today they seem more hung up on Facebook and Google mining data to serve ads.
It is rational to worry about something proportionally to the product of how bad it would be and the probability of it happening to you. Getting drone-striked would be worse than losing a job because of data mined from your online presence, but the latter is orders of magnitude more likely to happen to you.
Privacy does matter. To me, the way forward on privacy is real privacy. Encrypted everything and laws against tracking people on the internet except with explicit consent construed narrowly. I don't think the way forward is trying to paint the government as the bad guy while giving private companies carte blanche to do all the same things.
My personal experience has been that privacy and data protection (not the same thing, but of course closely related in practice) are issues that are very hard to advocate for. This is mainly due to a combination of "it would never happen to me" (which it probably won't, if we consider only a limited range of "it" and what is happening right now, today) and the stable-door-horse-bolted nature of the problem.
Of course, this doesn't mean it's any less worth defending the principle and advocating for change. It just means it's sometimes hard to get past "I don't care what Facebook uses to advertise to me" or "If you've got nothing to hide then you've got nothing to fear" as the default response even from quite smart and rational people if they haven't spent much time thinking about the issue and/or don't fully understand the technology involved and its potential applications.
In general, I don't think privacy and data protection laws are anything like strong enough in most jurisdictions today, and I think the data mining industries (and governments) are pushing the boundaries of acceptable behaviour as far as they can as fast as they can so they can then claim that their behaviour is normal and accepted and therefore "OK" before those laws catch up.
The difficulty is that privacy is something of a Pandora's box situation -- once lost, it is almost impossible to truly restore -- with the added twist that it's mostly important to protect against "it would never happen to me" situations, which means the average person doesn't realise or doesn't care what they're losing until it is too late. I'm afraid the data miners will win (or already have won) and for at least one generation the safeguards that privacy should bring them have been lost for life.
Realistically, most people probably won't suffer great hardship as a result. The worst they'll get is some spammy advertising. The people we should worry for are the innocent ones who will nevertheless spend months trying to fix their credit after identity theft, or paying a fortune to accountants when they are investigated for (negligently) suspected tax fraud, or going through a hellish legal process for months to defend themselves against false accusations, or trying to get permission to travel on holiday after being put on some list because something they said was taken out of context, or having their candidacy for public office undermined by character assassination, or in the ultimate worst case who are dead because the SWAT raid/drone strike/other severe and immediate action left them no chance to set the record straight. These are among the reasons privacy and data protection really matter, but to the extent that anyone is really questioning laws and practices today they seem more hung up on Facebook and Google mining data to serve ads.