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So, society decided that sharing personal information for tracking purposes is not acceptable. Two basic conditions are needed to have a plausible claim that the user has freely agreed to be profiled – did they have complete control over the process:
– did they explicitly opt-in with clarity of the extent of profiling
– can they opt-out at any time
GDPR legislation is instrumental to get us all used to transact with consent strings and detailed consent banners. Far from a perfect solution, but at least they are sticking by the intent of the law and not watering it down.
For every profile you might have for every user, are you 100% sure the user agreed to every piece of information in said profile? Did the consent really include sharing downstream? Can you recall the identifier from every partner? These questions are basic GDPR compliance that the browsers are now codifying into APIs.
At this point, we could subside into complaining about how this plays into the hands of the platforms and is hurting the independent publishers. But we won’t. User privacy is important and the advertising industry needs to step up to the plate. We will touch this subject in the second part of this series.
Cynical observation would be that the users who will agree with sharing their information will find themselves in a much more complete surveillance apparatus then before though. Should they use the same email on multiple sites and services, there will be no built-in forgetfulness of the ecosystem anymore. Value exchange will be explicit, and benefits for both sides will be explicit.
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