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I was being kind of obscure. My point was to deride the irrelevant, detailed regulation represented by the California statute.
I have to admit, California's law is beyond stupid, but isn't that what we expect from politicians in general, and California politicians specifically.
On the Internet, privacy is currency. The point of the privacy policy is not to protect a user's privacy, but to disclose how much privacy the user must forfeit to enjoy the service.
To me, a site without an up-front privacy notice implies that the service is "free," when in fact it is not. While the California law may be absurd, existing protections against fraud may apply here. What if a restaurant were to change its prices after you've finished your meal and stick you with a bill much higher than expected?
If you have to use the service before you can access the privacy policy, you've already paid before learning the price.
I agree that information is a sort of currency that people trade on the Internet in order to get goods and services that are otherwise free. Your analogy to restaurant menus is a good one. What should be done to ensure that people are aware of the prices charged? In the case of restaurants, "nothing" seems to be the answer.
With a few exceptions, such as per-item pricing at grocery stores when UPC coding came into widespread use, most every seller has learned that quoting a price ahead of time is almost always required to get someone to buy from them. (Regulators demanded per-item pricing on groceries before things could play out, but I suspect there would have been natural convergence on informing consumers adequately well of prices because they demand to know that. Today, there are probably places where per-item pricing still required even though it's no longer needed - because of prices on shelves, for example - meaning higher prices to consumers.)
When a restaurant menu doesn't have prices, what's the assumption? That the meal is very, very expensive. I think absence of a privacy policy would signal the same thing about the "cost" of visiting a site in terms of personal information.
Privacy policies tend to "signal" to people that they are paying a relatively low cost even when the policy itself *says* the opposite. Especially when privacy policies are required by the government, that may suggest to the average consumer (not nearly as focused on this as any of us) that their privacy has government-backed protection, though the terms of the policy do no privacy protecting at all.
So I'm leery of privacy policies as a way of actually getting people's privacy protected. People don't read them, and so don't act on the knowledge of what's in them. The California law may perversely be fooling consumers into thinking their privacy is secure when it's not.
I'd rather have consumers fending for themselves - and knowing it - so that they will use their savvy rather than falling back on consumer protection laws that, in this case, don't protect them at all.
What's the site going to do on any other page, anyway?
Track my IP address?
Track what pages I visited?
Those are the defaults on every web site anyway, so who cares?
It is now clear that a blogger’s identity/anonymity is not protected by law.