How Big Tech turns privacy laws into privacy theater.
Privacy law is manifested in practice as a litany of “Agree” buttons to consent to data collection and a series of long, convoluted statements of data collection practices that are supposed to give users enough notice about what companies do with our data to enable us to make informed decisions. Almost everyone you ask—policymakers, practitioners, academics—agrees that this system is inadequate. The last time most of us read a privacy policy is never. And even if we did and were offended by what we saw, we rarely have privacy-protective alternatives.
Companies like to tell us that they “care” about our privacy or that our “privacy is important” to them, but the truth is that tech companies systematically co-opt both their employees and the law so that everyone—even those who consider themselves privacy advocates—and everything they do—even tasks that seem privacy protective—all end up serving their employers’ data extractive needs in the end.
Source: How Big Tech turns privacy laws into privacy theater.
