do they need to? I don’t think so.

Why not? How can you be sure that all these laws are going to be about all the same things and not have many tricky edge cases? What would keep them from being like that? Again, these laws give unique rights to residents of their respective states to make particular demands of websites, and they aren’t copy pastes of each other. There’s no documented ‘best practices’ that is guaranteed to encompass all of them.

they don’t want this solution, however, but in my understanding instead to force every state to have weaker privacy laws

I can’t speak to what they really want privately, but in the industry letter linked in the article, it seems that the explicit request is something like a US equivalent of the GDPR:

A national privacy law that is clear and fair to business and empowering to consumers will foster the digital ecosystem necessary for America to compete.

To me that seems like a pretty sensible thing to be asking for; a centrally codified set of practices to avoid confusion and complexity.

In 2022, industry front groups co-signed a letter to Congress arguing that “[a] growing patchwork of state laws are emerging which threaten innovation and create consumer and business confusion.” In 2024, they were at it again this Congress, using the term four times in five paragraphs.

Big Tobacco did the same thing.

Is this really a fair comparison though? A variety of local laws about smoking in restaurants makes sense because restaurants are inherently tied to their physical location. A restaurant would only have to know and follow the rules of their town, state and country, and the town can take the time to ensure that its laws are compatible with the state and country laws.

A website is global. Every local law that can be enforced must be followed, and the burden isn’t on legislators to make sure their rules are compatible with all the other rules. Needing to make a subtly different version of a website to serve to every state and country to be in full compliance with all their different rules, and needing to have lawyers check over all of them would create a situation where the difficulty and expense of making and maintaining a website or other online service is prohibitive. That seems like a legitimate reason to want unified standards.

To be fair there are plenty of privacy regulations that this wouldn’t apply to, like the example the article gives of San Francisco banning the use of facial recognition tech by police. But the industry complaint linked in the article references laws like https://www.oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa and https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/sb21-190 that obligate websites to fulfill particular demands made by residents of those states respectively. Subtle differences in those sorts of laws seems like something that could cause actual problems, unlike differences in smoking laws.

If you are at the point where you are having to worry about government or corporate entities setting traps at the local library? You… kind of already lost.

What about just a blackmailer assuming anyone booting an OS from a public computer has something to hide? And then they have write access and there’s no defense, and it doesn’t have to be everywhere because people seeking privacy this way will have to be picking new locations each time. An attack like that wouldn’t have to be targeted at a particular person.

Isn’t it risky plugging usb drives into untrusted machines?

I bet it was something like the hardware id instead but she misspoke

I wonder if part of the reason for supporting this is that they like the secondary effect that all this information is now also available to governments

The profit they get from the sale of the television should be enough that they don’t have to make the television shit to get slightly more profit, why do people even buy these

But televisions cost hundreds of dollars at least

“each new connected TV platform user generates around $5 per quarter in data and advertising revenue.”

Sounds like a pathetic amount of money for betraying your customers with a shitty ad infested smart tv

Can anyone recommend any cool mods/projects built on top of Minetest?

tbf the article only assumes he told them no because of how implausible it seems the task would be, the actual details of what if anything was discussed and what happened are unknown.

Privacy means personal agency and freedom from people, whether individuals, companies, or the government, controlling you with direct or implied threats, or more subtle manipulation, which they can do because they have your dox and because information is power.

A lack of privacy adds fuel to the polycrisis because if we can’t act in relative secrecy that basically means we can’t act freely at all, and nothing can challenge whoever runs the panopticon.

I did all my transportation and shopping with a mountain bike for a year and it’s kind of difficult on snow and ice, fell over some. The trick is to never turn at all when on that stuff, but it’s still hard. The cold makes the oil for the mechanisms work worse too, you need special oil. My hands got very cold holding on to the handlebars, you need to find some balance between gloves that hold warmth and resist the wind and gloves that let you have enough dexterity for the brakes and shifters.

So much awful stuff that both sides seem to be able to agree on

Anti-money laundering provisions in the EU have been adjusted several times though

Adjusted to give more leeway? Can you cite a source on this happening

Better but still pretty bad, in that case can only hope the software/trading ecosystems for p2p improve enough to be more generally viable and that once that happens there won’t be reactive legislation to stamp it out.

Because of inflation, it’s not going to stay 3k. All rules of this type have fixed amounts that never get updated and every year encompass more transactions.

Supposedly this legislation also bans anonymous cryptocurrency.

Youtube’s actual website usually doesn’t even work for me anymore. The page takes a really long time to load and often gets stuck and doesn’t load at all.

What gets me about this is that, while it would still be bad, they could have mostly avoided the privacy nightmare here with some kind of Zero Knowledge Proof scheme, but the tracking is obviously part of the point.