Thread · 4 tweets · 16 Nov 2022

It's hard to even begin listing how much of this is evidently wrong. There is no global privacy law nor any regional one that would be acceptable for this purpose. Having a standard comply with the GDPR is a meaningless proposition. You could obtain consent and anything goes.

Open standards aren't made by the members of an SDO, they're made by the community at large. Eg. W3C standards are made by the Web community, which includes having to address substantial concerns from anyone. It's what makes them so legitimate; it also rules out contracts.

Using pinky promise contract banks à la SWAN is a technique that has been implemented as a solution by the tracking industry for over two decades now and it has nothing but abject failure to show for it. SWAN is nothing but a clumsy mishmash of failed ideas, that's one of them.

Finally, it's patently transparent to everyone in industry and policy that the SWAN coterie is just an effort to preserve intermediary power to the detriment of people, publishers, and advertisers. No one is fooled. That it is also inept in every way is just added comedy value.