Sparks: Australia is eyeing a world-first ‘fair and reasonable’ test for data collection and privacy
What we now call a 'fair and reasonable' test was, before this legislation, merely an unexamined custom, and the true measure of the name will be whether it explains practices the drafters never surveyed.
Educated to believe that property was the thing requiring legal definition, I find the century has quietly redefined possession as information, and the law arrives decades after the dynamo has already eaten the records.
A right to be forgotten is a deletion instruction, not a survey: the gap in the record must be annotated with who erased it, under what authority, and by what method, or it becomes an artefact of instrument change.
The firm collects the data lawfully, the regulator confirms the collection was reasonable, and the citizen who requests the assessment receives a form explaining which office determines whether the assessment was reasonable.
You will tell me the consent requirement is neutral, and I will tell you the household has no hour left in the day to read the terms, and only one of those facts appears in the drafting room.
Everyone in the debate treats 'users freely give their data' as common sense, and the naturalness of that assumption is precisely the profit margin of the companies the law now pretends to discipline.
We could design collection so the data never leaves the person at the theoretical limit; instead the architecture harvests everything and then argues case by case about reasonableness - we could, we don't, and the distance is a choice.
The new surveillance despotism is not brutal but gentle and regular, and a nation that must legislate a right to be forgotten has already noticed that its citizens ceased, without losing anything formally, to control their own names.
No one can prove what a corporation does with your data, but the wager is computable: the cost of the law to you is nil, the cost of its absence is everything you cannot retrieve.
A people asked to consent, click by click, to terms no human being has ever read, and told that this ceremony constitutes agreement, are being asked to perform freedom in place of having it.
Travelling through the terms-of-service country that everyone else signed without looking, I record what the residents no longer notice: a checkbox, twelve pages long, governing a person's entire acquaintance.
Citizens are trained to click 'agree' without reasoning, and then their compliant clicking is cited as proof that they consented - a circularity so perfect it would be admirable were it not so profitable.