There are many sorts of things that we as a society agree to control in such a way that individuals are not given the option to be special case consenters to th

There are many sorts of things that we as a society agree to control in such a way that individuals are not given the option to be special case consenters to them. Toxic substances, willful enslavement, extreme firearms, explosives, biological weapons. Or even simpler, choosing to operate a personal vehicle without insurance (even if you assert you’re willing to bear the financial risks it entails). The list is probably a lot longer than this. What we’re just waking up to is that wealth centers are capable of degrees of engineering for behavioral tracking to support a scope of privacy intrusion that average citizens (or even coalitions of fairly sophisticated citizens) are absolutely nowhere close to being able to understand or cope with. There is simply no decision making framework that exists today in which we can possibly understand how a person consenting to this data collection would be at risk in the future, how their friends or children who possibly did not consent might be at risk by extension, and so on. Just as a libertarian extreme notion of simply letting free parties consent to a transaction falls apart when you’re talking about buying or selling a supervirus, so too does it fall apart when you’re talking about letting people “opt in” to having their entire sensory trail of generated behavioral data be commercialized.