Although many celebrated the passing and "enforcement" of the GDPR, I consider it to be one of the biggest failures in recent times. I'd argue the situation is

Although many celebrated the passing and "enforcement" of the GDPR, I consider it to be one of the biggest failures in recent times. I'd argue the situation is worse today, and so far, the GDPR doesn't have any teeth whatsoever. On one website this is the cookie pop-up "consent" message: "We use cookies to provide a great experience. If you're happy with this, continue browsing" Apparently that counts as an "explicit, freely informed, permission given" consent now? I have found countless examples of websites sending data to facebook (including PII), simply by using XHR/fetch and a POST request, sending entire page URLs every time you navigate the website. I've noticed tens of requests to several domains that could be hijacked at any time and peoples information collected by a bad actor is they get the domain "totallynotspyingonyou.com" If the GDPR was serious platform changes would've been implemented - similar to Apple's coming tracking permission - which should be standard on every OS inside the EU. Instead of relying on websites/providers to the right thing, the upstream systems (browsers, OS) should be designed around the laws instead. As it stands, Google allows their OS to collect an individuals entire address book, apparently that data structure can be parsed, uploaded and freely traded once somebody taps "accept", and if my data is included...Well tough shit for me I guess. Asking Google whom has got my phone number saved onto their accounts yields no response, yet if somebody puts my PII onto Google, I have no rights over it. The "rights" the GDPR enshrined are nothing more than a empty, hollow promise - how many have had success trying to get information deleted? All I get told is it's "legal" as there's a "public interest" or for any number of reasons. Regulators simply can't and won't keep up. Reporting Google is a waste of time, a regulator is unlikely to touch them, even if there is data Google won't provide in a SAR and take months to provide a response. We need to embrace and accept data is going to be collected on all humans and kept for as long as the collector wants, and it can be sold, leaked, used and abused without you having any way to control it. We're all just numbers in a database somewhere, your feelings don't matter, how it affects your life on earth is disregarded, ads must be sold, data must be harvested. Welcome to 2021.