Do you really want politicians protecting your privacy?

September 13, 4:53 PMDallas Libertarian ExaminerGarry Reed

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DANGER! DANGER!
This online ad could be
pillaging your privacy!

Asking Congress to protect your online privacy is like asking a professional pickpocket to guard your wallet.

But that's exactly what a majority of Americans seem eager to submit themselves to.

Internet marketers track onliner's habits for what they view, post, and search for, collect as much personal poop as possible, and then serve up an ad specifically targeted to the users' interests the next time they visit a venue.

So Congress, according to an AP article, wants to step in with "a bill that would impose broad new rules on Web sites and advertisers" in the name of protecting our privacy.

This would involve a potpourri of new regs including the cyber surfer's right to "opt in" or "opt out" of the data digging.

But the fact that private information can be abused is the best reason to keep the government, the greatest information abuser of all, out of our personal lives and off the Internet.

Consider: other than invading your privacy without your knowledge, how exactly are you being harmed by advertisers? You're not being coerced or threatened or fraudulently induced into doing anything. An online ad can't compel you to look at it. You may consider it an inconvenience, just as telemarketing calls on your phone or ad fliers in your mailbox or spam in your inbox are inconveniences, but those website ads are what keep many of your favorite sites free. Or even keep them in existence at all.

Yet after 1,445 words that AP article did not offer a single example of danger to online users.

Yes, prospective employers might visit your FaceSpace or MyBook or NetNarcissist or similar vanity sites to get the dish on you, but you posted that stuff yourself. Voluntarily. It has nothing to do with advertising.

Yes, prospective health insurance providers might track what medical sites you visit as an indication of your insurability, but the whole healthcare industry is utterly screwed up anyway, outrageously overregulated as it is, and could best be cleaned up by opening a window and letting in the fresh air of free and open competition as opposed to yet more government regulation.

And don't even talk about identity theft. The government itself is no better than the private sector, and perhaps even worse, at guarding the dogpile of data it develops on everyone. And theft is already a crime, both online and offline, and has nothing to do with regulating advertisers.

But who could possibly be against online privacy? The Center for Digital Democracy and nine other "privacy groups" think government regulation is a great idea.

Libertarians would like to remind you of something.

This is government we're talking about here.

These are the people who were once charged with conducting a countrywide census to find out how many people lived in America and turned that simple exercise into a massive scavenger hunt by demanding that you reveal your ethnic origins, how much money you earn and where it comes from, how many flush toilets you have, whether you live with an unmarried partner and, according to the 2010 Census and American Community Survey (pdf), dozens of other time-consuming multi-part privacy-invading questions that are not the business of bureaucrats in a free society.

These are the people who went from "No Taxation Without Representation" to collecting "Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises" under the Constitution to "spreading the wealth" via near-confiscatory income taxes and property taxes and business taxes and inheritance taxes and sales taxes and every other kind and shape and size and variety of taxation imaginable.

These are the people who went from "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" to "roughly twenty thousand gun control-laws in the United States." (Second Amendment Foundation)

Every new foray by congress into regulatory control of the Internet sets a precedent for the next incursion, and the next, and the next, and the next.

So here are two questions. To make it easy for you, the answers have been provided as well.

1. What does a web advertiser actually do with your private information? Shows you a targeted ad when you go online to look for Grandma Gurdie's Favorite Prune Pudding recipe.

2. What does government actually do with your private information? Taxes you and regulates you and dictates to you and violates your rights and steals your freedom and threatens you with arrest and fines and imprisonment if you don't knuckle under to every one of their mindlessly infinite demands on your time and money and property.

Government is the ultimate privacy violator, tracking every aspect of our lives from birth to burial through Social Security numbers and tax forms and credentials and certifications and licensing and passports and permits and traffic tickets and military service and uncountable other intrusions, eventually to include that greatest of Gestapo wet dreams, the present-on-demand digital identity card packed with your private, repeat private, information.

And yet, quixotically, according to the article, privacy activists "are pinning their hopes on lawmakers," those very people who relentlessly track every detail of our existence already, to "protect" us from the mere inconvenience of online targeted advertising.

Still think this is a great idea?

Adult people who beg that their mere inconveniences be regulated by the surrogate Mommies and Daddies of the bureaucratic state have no right to whimper and whine when they finally wake up and find that their freedoms are gone forever.

Be very careful what you wish for.