There are at least three fallacies with stuff like GDPR that trigger anxiety in people by convincing them that they can somehow safeguard their own privacy while surfing hundreds of websites per day, many in other countries. I'm not going to fully discredit them, just give counterexamples:
1) The internet can continue to work without tracking users
- Targeted advertising (can't have both, although I can't say that I'll miss ads)
2) Users care that companies have their personally identifiable information (PII)
- Users care how companies share and abuse their data for profit (they already know they're being tracked if they don't use something like TorBrowser)
So I view all of this security theater with utter skepticism. I think the only thing that can maybe save us is transparency. Letting users download their data and using the threat of audit to keep internet companies honest:
The rest of the squabbling about "no that's PII, you can't save that!" has only resulted in endless nagging and distraction. It's like trying to hide your address from the post office or thinking that your phone number is secret because it's not in the phonebook.
Although I do think it's kind of funny to make big companies feel like they're living under a police state. They'll work tirelessly to undermine these protections, which is why we'll eventually abandon them like we did with prohibition and McCarthyism because they just aren't enforceable when everyone is breaking the law. Or (equally likely) they'll work to bolster these laws to create new markets through power imbalance, ensuring that only the largest companies can meet compliance and smaller companies pay some sort of protection money against the threat of litigation, which opens the door to mass corruption. Both of these scenarios are ugly enough that I think this entire rabbit hole is suspect.
There are at least three fallacies with stuff like GDPR that trigger anxiety in people by convincing them that they can somehow safeguard their own privacy while surfing hundreds of websites per day, many in other countries. I'm not going to fully discredit them, just give counterexamples:
1) The internet can continue to work without tracking users
- Targeted advertising (can't have both, although I can't say that I'll miss ads)
2) Users care that companies have their personally identifiable information (PII)
- Users care how companies share and abuse their data for profit (they already know they're being tracked if they don't use something like TorBrowser)
3) Privacy protections actually result in privacy
- PRISM and similar will always find you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_government_mass_survei...
So I view all of this security theater with utter skepticism. I think the only thing that can maybe save us is transparency. Letting users download their data and using the threat of audit to keep internet companies honest:
https://securiti.ai/blog/dsar-rights-and-compliance/
The rest of the squabbling about "no that's PII, you can't save that!" has only resulted in endless nagging and distraction. It's like trying to hide your address from the post office or thinking that your phone number is secret because it's not in the phonebook.
Although I do think it's kind of funny to make big companies feel like they're living under a police state. They'll work tirelessly to undermine these protections, which is why we'll eventually abandon them like we did with prohibition and McCarthyism because they just aren't enforceable when everyone is breaking the law. Or (equally likely) they'll work to bolster these laws to create new markets through power imbalance, ensuring that only the largest companies can meet compliance and smaller companies pay some sort of protection money against the threat of litigation, which opens the door to mass corruption. Both of these scenarios are ugly enough that I think this entire rabbit hole is suspect.