Laws that make customers more informed about the deals to which they agree on help with encouraging the innovation we want and improve competition.
I like the spirit of this, but want to mention GDPR as a counterpoint. One of the purposes of that law was to ensure that customers are better informed, and yet the mandatory cookie popups just made the experience of browsing websites much worse.
I think that GDPR actually made the average user better informed. Common knowledge is costly and it’s debatable whether the GDPR in particular balances the costs well, but it did provide more information.
As far as innovation goes GDPR did force companies to come up with a bunch of different innovations about protecting privacy that they otherwise wouldn’t have created. There are likely also innovations in ad-tech that are prevented through GDPR.
It was a relatively blunt instrument to get companies to innovate in privacy which they otherwise wouldn’t have. It had a cost of making other innovations harder.
The law could have been written better, but I don’t think there is a principle problem with the goal.
I like the spirit of this, but want to mention GDPR as a counterpoint. One of the purposes of that law was to ensure that customers are better informed, and yet the mandatory cookie popups just made the experience of browsing websites much worse.
I think that GDPR actually made the average user better informed. Common knowledge is costly and it’s debatable whether the GDPR in particular balances the costs well, but it did provide more information.
As far as innovation goes GDPR did force companies to come up with a bunch of different innovations about protecting privacy that they otherwise wouldn’t have created. There are likely also innovations in ad-tech that are prevented through GDPR.
It was a relatively blunt instrument to get companies to innovate in privacy which they otherwise wouldn’t have. It had a cost of making other innovations harder.
The law could have been written better, but I don’t think there is a principle problem with the goal.