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Website Opt-Out Practices Ate Our Data and Broke Us
It’s time to confront the tech industry’s data collection excesses
Is there anything more valuable to each of us than our identity? Not the piece of plastic with our driver’s license on it but the details of who we are — our personalities, interests, likes and dislikes, familial connections, hometowns, and current homes — all those bits and pieces that coalesce into a clearly defined picture of you.
We cherish our identities while simultaneously giving almost every bit of them away.
It’s not our fault. We’ve spent almost two decades ignoring opt-out buttons, those tiny squares asking if you want to share your name and email, receive newsletters, or allow for constant location tracking. Essentially agreeing to share points, clicks, and data bits with abandon.
A decade ago, I wrote that opt-out schemes were fundamentally flawed:
Opt-out schemes often fail. They do so for a variety of reasons:
People don’t read them.
People don’t understand them.
People ignore them and think that counts as saying no.
Back then the idea that Facebook and other online entities could build a rich profile of you based on this action…
