In recent weeks, I keep hearing politicians and journalists saying this online data protection issue is difficult, or impossible to solve. Is forcing online companies by law to give people a genuine opt out of 3rd party data sharing really that difficult?
I’m sure if Facebook (using them as an example) surveyed all of their users and asked “would you like us to share and/or sell your private data to 3rd parties?” 0% would say yes. Yet 100% of their users have agreed to let Facebook do exactly that because it’s not possible to opt out of it and still use their service.
Simply make it illegal for these companies to share data without the express permission of the user and make it illegal to make that permission conditional on continued use of said service. I don’t know about other countries but in the UK data-protection for customers in the real-world is serious sh*t that companies can get in trouble for. So why is it okay for companies in the online world to act like it’s the wild west with people’s privacy?
It doesn’t even need to be on an international basis (it would be better if it was through), individual countries can legislate on this and the companies will obey the laws in those countries like they do across real-world borders because they want to do business in those countries.
Totally agree. The sad fact of the world is that you sometimes have to save people from themselves. Hell I’m all about privacy and yet I have a Facebook page.
But that’s my point. You didn’t have the option to save yourself. It was use the service and get screwed, or not use the service. Things like facebook, twitter, youtube and google are facts of life now. Asking people to choose between being able to use them at all and a vague possibility that their data might be used by a “trusted” 3rd party, is not a fair choice.
Yeah, I was coming at this from the angle of “people can opt out by not using the service,” but that’s akin to victim blaming and, as you said, these services are a fact of life at this point, so putting the onus on consumers to do the changing is definitely not fair. I guess I hadn’t really thought it through well enough.
I know a few people I quite like who I would lose contact with completely due to distance if I just deleted my Facebook account (as tempting as it always is), and I’m sure many other people are in the same boat. Like I was saying, we’re at a moment in history were this technology is new enough and has quickly proliferated global society before we had a chance to really understand the ramifications of it, but hopefully a change is coming soon.