Editorial Board, The Washington Post; Opinion: A lawsuit against Google points out a much bigger privacy problem
"The phenomenon the recent suits describe, after all, is not particular to Google but rather endemic to almost the entirety of the Web: Companies get to set all the rules, as long as they run those rules by consumers in convoluted terms of service that even those capable of decoding the legalistic language rarely bother to read. Other mechanisms for notice and consent, such as opt-outs and opt-ins, create similar problems. Control for the consumer is mostly an illusion. The federal privacy law the country has sorely needed for decades would replace this old regime with meaningful limitations on what data companies can collect and in what contexts, so that the burden would be on them not to violate the reasonable expectations of their users, rather than placing the burden on the users to spell out what information they will and will not allow the tech firms to have.
The question shouldn’t be whether companies gather unnecessary amounts of sensitive information about their users sneakily — it should be whether companies amass these troves at all. Until Congress ensures that’s true for the whole country, Americans will be clicking through policies and prompts that do little to protect them."
