Imagine going into a travel agent to inquire about a flight. The moment you step through the door 50 people attach themselves to you. Some start recording your every action in a notebook, others flash torches in your eyes, two of them start showing you a video at the same time. And the rest follow you around holding up large ads. And they carry on following you around even after you leave the store!
And the current privacy laws in EU make the free services illegal. How is that any better than the scenario where paid services did not exist?
Free services may exist perfectly well:
- They must not invade privacy without obtaining consent
- They must not transfer personal information to jurisdictions with privacy controls which are too lax.
If a business relies on doing either of those two things, it deserves all the problems it has.
So much evil was done in the name of pretending to know what people want better than people themselves.
It didn't go that far. But when I saw people plastering Facebook like button everywhere I knew exactly what that meant. That one random corp now can know everything about everybody's behaviour everywhere.
Then Google put out Google analytics and I just switched my sites to this thing. I didn't mind all that much because it was Google and do no evil was still a thing.
But GDPR is something that reminds me of how ridiculous things we accepted as if they were normal just because they were technically feasible.