Rami Essaid of Distal Networks thinks we’re too focused on stopping tracking when we should be more focused on transparency about it:
… the world is engaged in the wrong conversation when it comes to Internet privacy. Tracking happens – get over it. The conversation we should be having isn’t about absolute privacy, as the European Union seems to believe, but about transparency.
The fight should be about bringing tracking out of the murky shadows and into the sunshine of full disclosure. The Internet public has a right to know the “Five W’s” of tracking at every site they visit: Who is tracking me, what are they doing with the information, where, when and why?
Read more on TechCrunch. Do you agree?
I vehemently disagree. While we do need much more transparency all around, data *collection* can’t be ignored. Once personal or device-specific data is collected, the user-citizen-consumer has lost control of it, and is forced to trust everyone that may ever come into contact with that data. Forever. That’s a huge leap of faith, especially given the steady stream of news about secondary uses of data, and about data that is lost, hacked, misused, and abused.
Collection is a harm in itself. We can’t wait years in the hopes that we will be able to detect violations properly attribute them to the chain of actors responsible, and then actually get justice through the courts. Many privacy harms will never be disclosed to the affected person. For example, you will probably never know you were denied that job or loan or insurance or membership because of some sketchy data broker record that was used illegally to discriminate against you.
Yes, we need more transparency. But we also need strong baseline privacy law that actually protects us from having our data surreptitiously collected daily by hundreds of unknown entities, online and off, stored forever, and used in myriad ways we can’t even begin to predict today.
Ya, see THIS is why we follow each other on Twitter.
I agree with you completely.