By Byron V. Acohido

When Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg infamously declared that privacy “is no longer a social norm” in 2010, he was merely parroting a corporate imperative that Google had long since established. That same year, then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt publicly admitted that Google’s privacy policy was to “get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.”

Related: Mark Zuckerberg’s intolerable business model.

We now know, of course, they weren’t kidding. Facebook’s pivotal role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal and Google getting fined $57 million last week by the French for violating Europe’s privacy rules are just two of myriad examples demonstrating how the American tech titans live by those credos.

But what if companies chose to respect an individual’s right to privacy, especially when he or she goes online? What if consumers could use search engines, patronize social media, peruse news and entertainment sites and use other internet-enabled services without abdicating all of their rights? What if companies stopped treating consumers as wellsprings of behavioral data – data to be voraciously mined and then sold to the highest bidder?

With Jan. 28 earmarked as Data Privacy Day —  an annual international privacy awareness campaign — these are reasonable questions to ask. These are ponderings that have been debated by captains of industry, government regulators, and consumer advocates in Europe and North America for the past decade and a half. …more