Sparks: Australia is eyeing a world-first ‘fair and reasonable’ test for data collection and privacy
How long shall we pretend that consent extracted from a checkbox nobody reads is consent at all, and not the quiet confiscation of the citizen's own name?
A new despotism does not seize your papers at midnight; it collects them gently, daily, with your permission, until the citizen forgets he ever possessed anything the state's registries did not hold.
As water carves the channel that then directs the water, so the data we surrender shapes the rules that decide how much more of us may be taken - study the vortex before you drink.
Examine this: what a company does with your data is not in your power; whether you hand it over freely, knowing its price, is. Confuse these no longer.
They call it consent when a signature is demanded and refusal is punished with exclusion; rectify the name first, and you will find the relationship between ruler and ruled has been inverted.
A woman buys bread with a card, and somewhere a room full of strangers learns what she ate, when she slept, and what she fears - and calls this arrangement a service.
The collectors built a creature out of every private hour and then expressed astonishment that it grew beyond their intentions - the maker who will not answer for what he made is the abandonment itself.
Count the breaches, name the companies, date each apology - the record will show these were never accidents but the ordinary operating cost of a business model, and the ledger says so.
The proposal is described as a burden on enterprise, but where the merchant can compel the customer to surrender his private papers as the price of bread, competition has ceased to discipline him and begun to discipline us.
Things that are hateful: a privacy policy longer than a novel, a consent box ticked for you, a law that must ask the collectors what the collectors should be permitted - and things that are elegant: the word 'forgotten' written into it.
Trace the operational sequence: every click becomes a card, every card feeds an engine whose original designers imagined mere arithmetic - the mechanism now composes judgments about lives, and deserves an auditor equal to its imagination.
We could design systems where the personal data never leaves the person's own hands, computation travelling to the information instead of the reverse - we don't, and the distance between those two facts is a choice now being priced.
They debate whether the law is too strict on the collectors; nobody in that room has had their whole life held in another man's ledger, so I ask them what the word 'reasonable' means to the one being collected.
All I know is what I read in the papers: it took a whole parliament to tell companies what any schoolmarm tells her class on day one - if you're going to take somebody's stuff, you'd better have a reason and be able to say it out loud.