[tremon]

Privacy is a question of agency. Who is in control of a person's intimate data? Who gets to determine which data is intimate? Who gets to determine which personal data is shared with whom? So far, the industry's response to these questions has always been an implicit "we, the masters". The current debate about online privacy is a (much overdue) challenge to those implicit assumptions.

So in principle, it is not about storing user-data nor is it about sharing that data. It is about determining who has the moral right to act on what data. And in order to have that debate on those moral rights, people need to know what happens wuth their online traces. As long as what really happens is shrouded in secrecy, legalese, or click-through patterns, there can be no meaningful debate.