The GDPR tightens consent requirements - mandating clear and accurate information be provided to users at the point of sign up. Happily disingenuous T&Cs are on borrowed time - at least for European tech users, thanks to a new European Union data protection framework that will come into force next month. Senator Kennedy of Louisiana also made the point succinctly to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg this week, telling him to his face: “ Your user agreement sucks.” We couldn’t agree more. (And more recently: It was not consent, it was concealment.) Terms & Conditions are the biggest lie in the tech industry, as we’ve written before. Meanwhile Facebook is actively using your location to track your offline habits so it can make money targeting you with adverts. But do you know anyone who is actively using this feature? Yet millions of people started sharing their exact location with Facebook for a feature that’s now buried and mostly unused.

The feature lets you share your position with your friends so - and here’s that shiny promise - you can more easily hang out with them. Then the company can walk away with a defacto license to perpetually harvest that person’s data by claiming that a consent box was once ticked.Ī great example of that is Facebook’s Nearby Friends.

Instead one or two select features, with a mote of user benefit, tend to be presented at the point of sign up - to socially engineer ‘consent’. Because they haven’t been given a clear picture of what agreeing to share their data will really mean. The problem, as ever with the tech industry’s teeny-weeny greyscaled legalise, is that the people it refers to as “users” aren’t genuinely consenting to having their information sucked into the cloud for goodness knows what. Or Amazon Echo users realize Jeff Bezos’ ecommerce empire has amassed audio recordings of every single interaction they’ve had with their cute little smart speaker. Suddenly, Android users discover to their horror that Google’s mobile platform tells the company where they are all the time - thanks to baked-in location tracking bundled with Google services like Maps and Photos. When it’s not Facebook admitting it allowed data on as many as 87 million users to be sucked out by a developer on its platform who sold it to a political consultancy working for the Trump campaign, or dating app Grindr ‘ fessing up to sharing its users’ HIV status with third party A/B testers, some other ugly facet of the tech industry’s love affair with tracking everything its users do slides into view.

Another week, another massive privacy scandal.

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