We deserve to know which companies track & sell our location and sexual orientation

California is considering a landmark “Right to Know” privacy law that As much as technology continues to evolve, privacy legislation, especially in the US, continues to lag further and further behind. Political lobbying from Facebook, and other online powers that make money from your digital details, has made protecting privacy a non-issue in Washington (and America), until now.
If you’re not already following the Electronic Frontier Foundation, you really should, because they do good work, including alerting people to important legislation such as this out of California. It’s a complicated issue, but in a nutshell, California law already permits you to contact businesses and ask them to provide you a list of which other companies they provided (sold) your personal data to (basically for direct-marketing purposes), and what kind of data they gave them.

The new proposal would go much father.  The ACLU fact sheet on this says that current California only covers older styles of telemarketing, such as mail, email and phone calls.  The new law would include direct marketing via online advertisers, data brokers, and third party apps.
Another good thing the new proposal would do is update the laws listing of what kind of personal information the company would have you that it’s keeping on, and selling about, you.  For example, under the old law they’d have to tell you if they’re selling your name, address, and phone number.  But under the new law companies would have to tell you if they’re keeping track of, and selling, data about your sexual orientation, location, associations, and buying habits.
It really is scary what these companies know about us, and how much we don’t even know about what information they already have, and what they’re doing with it.  (Also scary is how much our own ignorance, or lack of caring, contributes to our lost privacy.)

General Wesley Clark 

It’s hard to believe that it’s been seven year since John Aravosis bought General Wesley Clark’s cell phone records for $89.  While John’s admirable stunt finally got that problem fixed, it’s going to take a lot more stunts to convince our government, and big business, to take our privacy seriously.
It’s not unreasonable for consumers to know how their personal data is being sold and used. And as EFF notes in their piece, these protections already exist overseas, so these companies already know how to pull this data.
Another important point that the EFF makes is that storing some of this data is not necessary. We all know how secure stored data is – not very – even when organizations have extensive security infrastructures. Store it and they will come, if you will.
Sadly, a number of large companies have banded together with the Obama administration to block efforts to improve privacy protections for several years now.  Dana Liebelson at Mother Jones wrote a few weeks ago about how Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Amazon and eBay are working with the Obama administration to fight European Union efforts to increase privacy protections across the Atlantic.
Facebook’s spending on lobbying is up 196%.  Google’s is up 70%.  And while some of that work is “good,” others, like their work to derail privacy legislation, is not.
Mark Zuckerberg’s sister Randi deserves the same privacy protections that Europeans enjoy.  It’s time for the US to take privacy seriously, and California’s proposed Right to Know law is a giant step in the right direction.