| I do think these are good ideas. I think so, because "If you disagree with [services using your data to finance themselves], you can just not use the service" is not actually a thing for the following reasons: 1) These services have no interest in actually providing you with truthful, complete or comprehensible information about what they do with your data. You actually cannot form an opinion that would allow you to judge the situation. 2) Even as someone in IT, who frequently reads about information being correlated or used in creative ways to cause damage, I do not feel like I could fully judge the impact of giving any piece of information about me to a company, even when I'm fully informed about the things they do with my data. The way they anonymize data might get proven to be deanonymizable. We might have crazy advances in technology, leading to modern cryptography being a joke and criminals decrypting the information that I produce right now. We might have some change in government, which for whatever fuck kind of reason feels like anyone who can be proven to have smiled at a Jew in their life, should be executed. And if I am in no position to judge something like that, the layperson is certainly not either and does need the law to help them out. 3) It's not anymore possible to live life by just not using services that violate your privacy. Most webpages have Google Analytics on them. Or Google Ads. Google anything. The prevailing desktop operating system is Windows, which is headed towards Windows 10. The prevailing mobile operating system is Android. The prevailing social network is Facebook. The prevailing messenger is WhatsApp. The prevailing video platform is YouTube. And far too many people see no problem sharing your e-mail conversations with Google. Even the bloomin train that I take to work has a surveillance cam in it, like it was the most normal of things. Which hadn't been legal prior to the GDPR either, they just didn't give a shit, because punishment was basically nonexistent. And no, I don't consider setting up a farm in the middle of buttfuck nowhere to be "living life". I cannot afford to be a social outcast, to not use the internet etc.. |