I appreciate the thought and energy on this but I fear it is hopelessly naive. Every regulation and law comes with unintended consequences.
That does not have to be the case, there are pro-privacy laws such as the GDPR and the CCPA that have not had unintended consequences that undermine privacy. When creating such laws there is also space for privacy advocates and others to voice concerns, which would be taken into account.
Granting the government broad powers to do things like choose our methods of communication will erode, not bolster privacy.
The government would not choose our methods of communication, maybe I worded vaguely what I meant. I meant that the government would start incentivizing / working on alternative open standard systems to the current SMS, e-mail and phone call communcations. Because the current ones are not great for privacy and security. It would be nice to have alternatives that did not leak metadata and had strong encryption. Such changes would provide billions with secure and private communication by default.
We need governments to do one thing and one thing only: nothing
Private companies like LinkedIn and WhatsApp hold a lot of social power and people are (in)directly often forced to use those privacy violating services. That is personally why I believe privacy should be regulated by default for everyone, so that such abuse does not happen.
Just let privacy conscious people use privacy tools as we see fit. Leave us alone and stop trying to ban encryption or force privacy destroying regulations like website age verification.
Do you think privacy should be given to everyone by default or do you belive it should be optional for those who want it?