Link: Cory Doctorow on surveillance and consent
Cory Doctorow on GDPR:
Enter the GDPR. Under Europe’s landmark privacy regulation, companies have to ask you a plain-language question confirming your consent to every piece of data they collect and every use they plan on making of that data. They can’t punish you for refusing consent – by locking you out of a service or degrading its quality – and you can withdraw your consent at any time.
This is deliberately burdensome. It takes the position that consent is a weighty and serious thing, that personal data is genuinely valuable, and that the transactions in which data is gathered and processed should be solemnized by a thoughtful, substantial ceremony. It calls ad-tech’s bluff: “If you think people are really OK with all that spying you’ve done, let’s ask them, in depth, before you do it.”
Cory also references this study
Behavioral ads are only more profitable than context ads if all the costs of surveillance – the emotional burden of being watched; the risk of breach, identity-theft and fraud; the potential for government seizure of surveillance data – is pushed onto internet users. If companies have to bear those costs, behavioral ads are a total failure, because no one in the history of the human race would actually grant consent to all the things that gets done with our data.
Absolutely on point.