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Who's winning here, exactly?
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2023
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Privacy
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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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Reading TOS and Privacy Policies are a useless endeavor. They aren’t written to empower consumers or inform them abou their meaningful choices, they’re written to disclaim the maximum amount of liability. That said, I agree with everything else you said. Data brokers, surveillance advertising, and the lack of any meaningful regulations are what got us into this mess - but all those wrongs can be righted. California just passed a law to let you delete your information from every registered data broker, forever. When given the choice consumers universally opt out of surveillance advertising. And though they’re aligning on opt out frameworks, more and more states are paying comprehensive consumer privacy laws. There’s some reason to be optimistic - but as someone in those trenches… not THAT optimistic.
No, at least in the EU, what is stated in the TOS and PP must be true by law. If companies pass data to third parties, without specifying it in these legal documents, they may face million-dollar fines and even closure. The same as in all legal documents. As much as everyone at the beginning says that they greatly respect user privacy, or similar, they must say in the rest of the text if they pass data to third parties when they do so. Therefore TOS and PP are reliable documents, and even give the user a legal document of proof, if the company does not comply with these conditions. After all, it is a contract between the company and the user who signs it, if they create an account. But this should bother you to read it, as it surely would also in other contracts.