Trying to understand consumer privacy behaviors outside the prevalent social contract that the vast majority of people operate under is bound to missinterpret what is happening and why.
We live in a regulated "supermarket" economy. What surfaces on a screen is entirely analogous to what surfaces on a shelf: People check the price and make their choices based on taste, budget etc. They are not idiots, they operate under a simplifying assumption that makes life in a complex world possible.
The implicit assumption central to this way of organising the economy is that anything legally on sale is "safe". That it has been checked and approved by experts that know what they are doing and have the consumer interest as top priority.
People will not rush back home to their chemistry labs to check what is in their purchased food, whether it corresponds to the label (assuming that such a label even exists) and what might be the short or long term health effects. They dont have the knowledge, resources and time to do that for all the stuff they get exposed to.
What has drifted in the digital economy is not consumer standards, it is regulatory standards. Surfacing digital products with questionable short and long term implications for individuals and society has become a lucrative business, has captured its regulatory environment and will keep exploiting opportunities and blind spots until there is pushback.
Ultimately regulators only derive legitimacy from serving their constituencies, but that feedback loop can be very slow and it gets tangled with myriad other unrelated political issues.
We live in a regulated "supermarket" economy. What surfaces on a screen is entirely analogous to what surfaces on a shelf: People check the price and make their choices based on taste, budget etc. They are not idiots, they operate under a simplifying assumption that makes life in a complex world possible.
The implicit assumption central to this way of organising the economy is that anything legally on sale is "safe". That it has been checked and approved by experts that know what they are doing and have the consumer interest as top priority.
People will not rush back home to their chemistry labs to check what is in their purchased food, whether it corresponds to the label (assuming that such a label even exists) and what might be the short or long term health effects. They dont have the knowledge, resources and time to do that for all the stuff they get exposed to.
What has drifted in the digital economy is not consumer standards, it is regulatory standards. Surfacing digital products with questionable short and long term implications for individuals and society has become a lucrative business, has captured its regulatory environment and will keep exploiting opportunities and blind spots until there is pushback.
Ultimately regulators only derive legitimacy from serving their constituencies, but that feedback loop can be very slow and it gets tangled with myriad other unrelated political issues.