Privacy has become an increasingly critical issue in the modern digital age. As technology has advanced, the ability to collect, store, and analyze vast amounts of personal data has grown exponentially. This has raised significant concerns about the potential for abuse, surveillance, and the erosion of individual freedoms.
Without privacy, and the ability to maintain a sphere of personal autonomy, we risk losing the very essence of what it means to be human.
A key element of privacy is the general “right to be left alone”, a view espoused by Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis in their famous 1890 Harvard Law Review article, and cemented in Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
Hence the need for robust privacy regulations and technological safeguards to protect citizens with clear limits on how governments and corporations can collect, use, and share our personal data.
In 1991 the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 (TCPA) was passed by the United States Congress and signed into law by President George H. W. Bush as Public Law 102-243 and thereby amending the Communications Act of 1934).
The TCPA restricts telephone solicitations (i.e., telemarketing) and the use of automated telephone equipment, and limits companies or debt collectors from calling clients or prospective customers using automatic dialing systems, artificial or prerecorded voice messages, SMS text messages, and fax machines.
But when this law was passed in 1991, the internet was in its infancy, and it did not cover email.
The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 attempted to address email spam, but has largely failed because it does not require e-mailers to get permission before they send marketing messages.
This error must be rectified as we prepare to protect our privacy in the Age of AI.
If privacy is not only a personal right, but a fundamental pillar of a free and democratic society, then the only way we can ensure our privacy, or the ‘right to be left alone’, is via consent-gated communications.
In the Secure Artificial Intelligence Act, introduced by Sens. Mark Warner (D-VA) and Thom Tillis (R-NC), an Artificial Intelligence Security Center would be established at the National Security Agency to address vulnerabilities that could be exploited through techniques that include privacy-based attacks and abuse attacks.
Sens. Warner and Tillis agree that we need legislation that allows us to establish, maintain, and possibly revoke the consent to communicate between two parties.
We need the Consensual Communications Act.
In the Age of AI, it is essential that we know exactly who is doing the communicating – we must have some sort of trusted knowledge about who is on the other end of the proverbial phone.
If not, who’s to say that we’re not communicating with nefarious state actors from Russia, China, North Korea, or Iran?
If we cannot be certain who we are communicating with, we must have the right to refuse to communicate with that other party. If we want to be ‘left alone’, to maintain our privacy, we must have the right to do so.
We need consent architecture, laws that support our ability to protect ourselves from unwanted communication, which risk being taken to the extreme with AI.
The core of the consent architecture, and a Consensual Communications Act, must be very simple – X (dis)allows Y for purpose Z until T.
As long as that rule exists, somewhere, like a contract, it is valid.
Help us maintain our personal privacy and protect our digital selves – help us make consent the backbone of future communications.
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Support the Consensual Communications Act!