Thread · 5 tweets · 16 Feb 2021

People keep saying that better privacy only helps the big platforms. Facebook’s SEC filing tells a different story (as does their battling against better privacy). Increasing privacy is key to building back a competitive digital market.

This isn't the only indication. Facebook and Google have taken considerable regulatory and reputational risk in order to track so much. It is hard to believe that they would do that if they did not need to so much.

The value of data has network effects: the more you have, the more valuable each datum. This entails that an unregulated data market will lead to monopoly. Experience seems to confirm that quite well.

This is why adtech building unified ID systems is self-defeating. This is why schemes like the @CMAgovUK's to make tracking data widely available are anticompetitive. I fully expect the Lumascape five years from now will be only made of privacy-preserving companies.

There's still much left to do, but let's keep pushing!