California Looking To Protect You From The Scourge Of Airlines Not Mentioning Privacy Policies You Don't Read

from the i-feel-so-much-safer dept

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Back in October, we wrote about how California Attorney General Kamala Harris was threatening United Airlines over Twitter, because their mobile app apparently didn't prominently display the app's privacy policy. California has a silly law that requires privacy policies. Now, Harris has actually sued Delta airlines over the same thing . Of all the illegal things that Harris could be going after, is focusing on mobile apps that don't prominently display their privacy policythe best use of her time and my taxpayer dollars?The whole infatuation with privacy policies is, frankly, stupid. They do nothing to actually increase your privacy. Since the only thing they do is hold you to your own rules, they actually encourage companies to take your privacyseriously, since to avoid possible liability, they're likely to craft privacy policies that aren't as strict. Furthermore,reads those things. Forcing companies to display a broadly written policy designed to limit their liability, which no one cares about and no one will read... just seems like a complete waste.Of course, as we've discussed before , this is exactly what state Attorneys General do all the time. They pick some random issue they can grandstand about, and then pick on companies over those issues, putting all sorts of public pressure on them, solely for the purpose of generating headlines about how they're "protecting consumers" or some other bogus claim... and then they use those headlines for when they run for higher office. The Attorney General slot is quite frequently seen as a stepping stone to becoming governor, and so many AGs abuse the position with these kinds of legal threats and lawsuits almost entirely to be used as campaign fodder. It's sad and pathetic and does little to actually protect the public.In Harris' press release about the lawsuit, she makes this silly claim: "Losing your personal privacy should not be the cost of using mobile apps, but all too often it is." But that's ridiculous. Just because Delta doesn't link to its privacy policy from the app doesn't mean that users lose their personal privacy.The only encouraging thing here is that looking through the comments on the Ars Technica article linked above, they seem almost universally to be against Harris for filing such a silly and pointless lawsuit. Maybe, one day, we can hope that such pointless grandstanding is seen for what it really is: a cynical ploy to make an Attorney General look good in the press, rather than any legitimate legal issue.

Filed Under: california, kamala harris, mobile apps, privacy, privacy policies

Companies: delta