How the GDPR Will Disrupt Google and Facebook
My first instinct was to be pretty happy about these laws, which surprised me quite a bit.  I generally identify on the libertarian&#x2F;pro-capitalist side of things and &quot;as a general rule&quot; subscribe to the belief that government regulations are often more problematic than problem solving[0].  So I had to take a moment to analyse why I felt this way.<p>Here&#x27;s the problem as I see it: I <i>know</i> all of the things that are collected, how they&#x27;re collected, what shady practices are used[1] and I&#x27;m completely aware that there <i>is</i> no anonymity left on the internet.  The old &quot;when the product is free, you&#x27;re the product&quot; isn&#x27;t lost on me.  In reading this, though, I was still finding myself a little outraged[2].  I look at it this way: if <i>yesterday</i>, we had an web with plain old &quot;dumb advertising&quot; techniques limited in sophistication in the manner of television advertising in the 90s, and today we ended up with <i>this</i>, there would be rioting (in the USA, anyway[3]).  This didn&#x27;t necessarily happen <i>slowly</i> but it happened gradually and <i>quietly</i>.  I remember when Facebook announced that it was adding the ability to track you on other sites that you visited while you were logged out -- that was announced and it was met with criticism (briefly, though I quit the platform about a month later in a quiet, personal, revolt).<p>Here&#x27;s the thing - if you ask an average non-technical individual if they understand that they&#x27;re being tracked on the internet, they&#x27;ll shrug and say &quot;yes&quot;.  If you dig a little deeper, you&#x27;ll discover that they haven&#x27;t the faintest idea how deeply they&#x27;re being tracked and that they don&#x27;t even have an analogy in their own lives to equate that tracking to.  I couldn&#x27;t come up with anything to describe the extent of tracking short of extremely lengthy explanations of what&#x27;s being done and used[4].<p>And then there&#x27;s me - I understand I&#x27;m being tracked and have basically chosen the head-in-the-sand approach.  I use adblock, and a few extensions that supposedly &quot;limit tracking&quot; (doubtful) but I know they&#x27;re worthless.  Here&#x27;s the thing, though, what choice do we have?  And that&#x27;s where I concluded how I was able to land in favor of some form of regulation on this behavior[5].  It is becoming increasingly impossible to avoid interacting with companies like Google and Facebook[6].  I look at it this way -- a company that becomes a monopoly in such an important industry can exert as much, if not more, control over the citizenry than their own government[7] but without the limitations imposed by democracy.<p>What should be done? I&#x27;m not sure.  Self-regulation isn&#x27;t working.  I have zero faith in government crafting any kind of law related to technology that won&#x27;t be some combination of horribly ineffective, worse than what we have today, utterly <i>breaks</i> something <i>really important</i>, or is used as a means to insert something <i>horrible</i> (watch them try to pop in a line-item around key-escrow).  I&#x27;m kind of surprised to find myself thinking that approach that looks the best, out of the options, is probably forced-competition through breaking up the companies involved and I <i>hate</i> that idea in principal and in practice -- it&#x27;s worked just-about as well in the past.<p>[0] I don&#x27;t want this to devolve into a flame-war of whether regulating is &quot;good or not&quot;, though I fear I may have just stoked that flame, I&#x27;m simply providing background for contextual purposes.<p>[1] I half- <i>admire</i> the creative uses of WebRTC with STUN on what are otherwise regarded as <i>highly reputable</i> major news sites.  It&#x27;s difficult for me to <i>not</i> see that practice as poking a hole in my firewall and I feel no less outrage when I see that happening than I do when a piece of malware does the same thing.<p>[2] Part of me had forgotten the idea that when GMail was &quot;scanning e-mails for advertising purposes&quot;, they were scanning e-mails that were coming <i>inbound</i> from non-GMail users who couldn&#x27;t have possibly consented to that.  I&#x27;m sure there&#x27;s a really good counter argument, but I&#x27;d have a hard time not feeling a little violated by that practice if I weren&#x27;t a GMail user, already.<p>[3] Probably elsewhere, but my experience is that some European countries&#x27; citizens (particularly the UK, where I have the most experience outside of the US) are more tolerant to this sort of thing whereas when I was a child, you&#x27;d have seen people gathering in militias the moment the government tried to propose something like Real ID.<p>[4] I can only speak anecdotally since I had this conversation with family members who are non-technical and after about <i>two hours</i>, had them quite disgusted -- asking <i>how is that legal</i> ... and these are some of the most government-skeptical conservative people you&#x27;d ever meet.<p>[5] And I have <i>zero</i> faith in the US government being able to craft a law that works.  Minimally the &quot;they must still offer the service if the user opts out&quot; will be removed, entirely, turning the &quot;agree to be tracked&quot; button into the moral equivalent of the &quot;Cookie Warning&quot; -- something you click because you <i>have to</i>.  And philosophically, if we weren&#x27;t talking about monopolies or near-monopolies here, I&#x27;d agree with that approach.<p>[6] Yes, DuckDuckGo is my default search engine, everywhere.  And I&#x27;ve now trained myself to use the shortcut to get to google for the 60-70% of searches that DDG returns unworkable results.  I think it&#x27;s my search patterns, which tend to be very narrow in results, causing Bing&#x2F;DDG to &quot;broaden&quot; and ignore terms (or when used with parameters, simply yield nothing).  My parents (both retired) use DDG and <i>rarely</i> anything else since I switched all of their browsers around (they didn&#x27;t even realize I had changed it -- they don&#x27;t think of Google as a company, they think of search as something &quot;the internet just <i>has</i> ...&quot;).  They are perfectly happy with it.<p>[7] Or can work in concert with it.  Requirements to hand over Facebook credentials at the border are becoming common.  I&#x27;m waiting for the day when I say &quot;yeah, I don&#x27;t use that&quot; and end up back in a little room with an angry looking man asking me a bunch of (the same; slightly rephrased) questions and responding to them with the assumption that I&#x27;m lying (personal experience on that one; not fun).  I mean, after all, I&#x27;m a programmer&#x2F;live on the internet&#x2F;et. al., surely I <i>must</i> use Facebook and I&#x27;m trying to <i>hide</i> something! &#x2F;s