Thread · 4 tweets · 20 May 2021

100% agree that this has a long history — but in a different context. Informed consent works great when you're participating in one experiment at a time and an IRB-trained grad student will sit down with you to make sure you get what you're consenting to.

If the approach does not work in the face of how bad players will use it, it's not a great approach. If the choice is "strictly essential processing (as DPAs currently understand it) or consent" then all we can expect from that is a lot of consent, it's designed in from the start

We can then keep pushing for stricter and stricter UI requirements; but then you just end up with the companies that can deploy the best A/B testing getting data. Look at the Chrome Sync consent funnel — it's super close to guidance, even though any human can tell it's deceptive.

I just want to put greater emphasis on collective decision-making in terms of what is appropriate and make individual carve-outs inherently suspicious. Hyper-individualistic approaches to data protection, like GDPR-style consent, put people at a disadvantage.