"The large tech companies point to our willing use of their services as proof that people don’t really care about their privacy. But this is like arguing that inmates are happy to be in jail because they use the prison library. Confronted with the reality of a monitored world, people make the rational decision to make the best of it.

That is not consent."

#MaciejCegłowski, 2019

https://idlewords.com/2019/06/the_new_wilderness.htm

#privacy#AmbientPrivacy

6 years later, this seems prescient;

"When all discussion takes place under the eye of software, in a for-profit medium working to shape the participants’ behavior, it may not be possible to create the consensus and shared sense of reality that is a prerequisite for self-government. If that is true, then the move away from ambient privacy will be an irreversible change, because it will remove our ability to function as a democracy."

#MaciejCegłowski, 2019

https://idlewords.com/2019/06/the_new_wilderness.htm

#democracy

"That is not the conversation Facebook or Google want us to have. Their totalizing vision is of a world with no ambient privacy and strong data protections, dominated by the few companies that can manage to hoard information at a planetary scale. They correctly see the new round of privacy laws as a weapon to deploy against smaller rivals, further consolidating their control over the algorithmic panopticon."

#MaciejCegłowski, 2019

https://idlewords.com/2019/06/the_new_wilderness.htm

#RegulatoryCapture