Good, but not good enough

Al Franken is pushing a "stalking app" bill which will limit the amount of information your mobile unit can collect about you and pass onto others without your knowledge.

"Companies — some legitimate, some sleazy — are collecting your child's location and selling it to ad companies or who knows who else," Franken, a Minnesota Democrat, said in a statement.

In his remarks to the Judiciary Committee, the senator pointed to a recent Federal Trade Commission report that found app makers are collecting an "alarming" amount of data about children, without disclosure.

To combat the problem, the Location Privacy Protection Act of 2011 would require companies to get customers' permission before collecting or sharing data with non-government third parties, but also works to raise awareness about GPS stalking, and makes it a crime to intentionally operate a stalking application.

Senator Franken's bill is a step in the right direction, but we must go further. This act still accepts the proposition that the government has a right to know any citizen's location and web-surfing habits. I would prefer to keep such things hidden from Uncle Sam, thank you very much. That preference doesn't make me a criminal. I am, in fact, a (more or less) law-abiding private citizen -- emphasis on the private.

If you are about to tell me "If you're doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about" -- well, that's what people told themselves in the Third Reich.

(And fuck Godwin's law. In this instance, the analogy to Hitler's Germany is perfectly appropriate.)

If Uncle wants to know what we are up to, Uncle ought to get a damn warrant. Uncle's minions must be forced to create a paper trail showing good cause for them to know the details of our lives. Your parents and grandparents would have sneered at this generation's lazy acceptance of Big Brotherism.