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By now, it is no secret that companies of all kinds are regularly mining data, your data and doing all sorts of things with it. They use it to tailor what ads show up in your browser, what videos show up in your YouTube feed, the news stories that you see in your aggregator, their own product development, and, most notoriously, sell it to third parties for who knows what purposes. Many have been voicing their displeasure with this situation for years and finally regular people are starting to wake up to the fact that important information about them is being collected and used in ways they may or may not approve of.\xa0

The public backlash against this wholesale data acquisition has started to show itself in legislation around the world. The European Union passed laws years ago meant to curb Google\u2019s monitoring of individuals and just recently California passed Proposition 24. This new law is meant to strengthen digital privacy laws, reducing how much companies can intrude on your digital life. While the proposition certainly identifies the right problem, does it identify the right solution?\xa0

The biggest indicator that Proposition 24 won\u2019t work as planned is that California would be setting up a massive new agency with a $10 million annual budget. As anyone who knows anything about government is well aware, setting up a government agency is not the most efficient way to spend $10 million a year. Especially since all you really need to do is give people the opportunity to opt out of all the data collection and sharing that a given company does. All that needs to happen is there be a box for the user to check and a few lines of code to make sure that person\u2019s data is not getting collected as it normally would. How easy is that to accomplish? It would take the software gurus at TARTLE about five hours to put together the necessary code. Five hours for a couple of people at a computer. Maybe throw in a couple bottles of kombucha to keep things moving. That\u2019s a lot less than a state run agency with a building and dozens, if not hundreds of people working for it.\xa0

Of course, there should be some sort of enforcement, some way of making sure that companies really are opting people out. But let\u2019s be honest, is the government really the best option here? After all, we learned years ago through the information leaked by Edward Snowden just how much information the government was collecting on people through means of, shall we say, dubious legality. Not to mention, these kinds of agencies have a tendency to grow overtime. While this agency would be a California agency at first, it would be a short period of time before other states followed suit, which would quickly morph into a federal agency. By that point, the rules and regulations concerning data would become so convoluted, they would make the convoluted terms of service we all blindly accept look like an Eric Carle children\u2019s book. That is not a model for the future that any normal person wants to see.\xa0

What are we to do then? Well, you\u2019ve heard the phrases \u201cvote with your dollar\u201d and \u201cvote with your feet\u201d. You can do something similar when you join TARTLE. You vote with your data. Don\u2019t let the big companies and the government have it in the first place. You don\u2019t have to worry so much about them honoring their opt-out protocols because we are doing it for you. Your data goes through our encryption and the only way it gets out is if you decide it should. We don\u2019t even do anything with it without your permission.\xa0

While the stated intent behind Proposition 24 is good and something we wholeheartedly agree with at TARTLE, the legislation itself is as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said, \u201ca mixed bag of partial steps both backwards and forwards\u201d. Or to put it another way, good intentions do not good laws make. That is one of the real goals of TARTLE, to represent a third way. Our existence reminds people that they don\u2019t have to choose between global conglomerates or massive governments. TARTLE reminds people that they can choose to manage things on their own, to take control of their data, and their lives.

What\u2019s your data worth? www.tartle.co

Tcast is brought to you by TARTLE. A global personal data marketplace that allows users to sell their personal information anonymously when they want to, while allowing buyers to access clean ready to analyze data sets on digital identities from all across the globe.

The show is hosted by Co-Founder and Source Data Pioneer Alexander McCaig and Head of Conscious Marketing Jason Rigby.

What's your data worth? Find out at ( https://tartle.co/ )

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