Privacy experts: Focus on controlling damage caused by data collection

A group of privacy experts from organizations including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union is advocating for better laws and technologies that keep data collection from hurting you. One of these tools could be regulation that gives consumers more rights over their data, like the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation. The law counters the trend of companies collecting whatever data they want on you and storing it indefinitely, because it puts them at risk of financial penalties if hackers steal the data or if it's misused, said Jon Callas, senior technology fellow at the ACLU. It also means thinking about the unexpected ways data from long ago, which Callas calls "data sludge," could be used against you.