Regardless her views representing the official FTC position I thought this challenge to dogmas of surveillance capitalism by Rebecca Kelly Slaughter was on the

Regardless her views representing the official FTC position I thought this challenge to dogmas of surveillance capitalism by Rebecca Kelly Slaughter was on the money, and it evidences widespread sentiment in the US population that supports her ideas. The first section on "Not just privacy" echos my own thoughts. Privacy is a too broad and ill-defined term. Labelling some things as "privacy issues" reduces them to relative personal morals and sweeps other harms under the rug. She properly terms these broader effects - that touch on civil liberties, freedom of movement, harms to competition, misinformation and exploitation - as "data abuses", the same language I've used in Digital Vegan and in Ethics for Hackers. So I am really happy to see this gaining usage. Overall though I still think a useful term is "Digital Dignity" because many of the harms done are hard to formulate yet seem natural affronts to personal dignity. Later she touches on the body dysphoria, suicides and other mental health issues plaguing teenage girls as a result of digital exploitation, but does not fully link them to the business models of Facebook etc. In the second section "Notice and Choice Is Not the Answer" Commissioner Slaughter nicely sums up why simply telling someone that you are going to harm them, when they have no effective choice or capacity to extricate, merely adds insult to injury. It is certainly no excuse or useful legal mechanism. I have long maintained that "meaningful choice" is absent since most ordinary people, even the most intelligent and well educated amongst us, effectively lack the capacity to consent over complex technical issues. Onerous contracts leveraging general ignorance abound in the digital world. In a way, section three is really her conclusion, albeit an obvious one, that "Minimization is a Better Model", but possibly because the scope of the FTC is limited fails to identify the broader problems of how abusive technologies are foisted onto people via other agencies, such as schools, governments and medical services. A more mature analysis would not blame only commercial data collection, but the overall societal normalisation of risky behaviours, and poor data hygiene. That said, I feel she gets the deeper point in saying: "It should not be necessary to trade one’s data away as the cost of full participation in society and the modern information economy." There is much more to this position statement that asserts "The FTC Can Lead the Way Forward on Data Minimalism", but whether that is possible or whether technical counter-surveillance and other kinds of Digital Self-Defence will be needed to beat back surveillance capitalism remains to be seen. In a sense the problem is that FTC and similar organisations may see themselves as omnipotent, or over-rate the effects of regulation. Therefore what I think is missing is a clear statement from bodies like the FTC that, where they exercise equity of power they will no longer impede citizens digital self defence measures, including reverse engineering, cracking and hacking DRM and keys, or any kind of hacking so long as it is clearly in the pursuit of protecting ones data, privacy and digital dignity. That would mean dissolving things like the DCMA of course. It maybe that USA, being a country that upholds a strong tradition of allowing people to defend themselves and their property, might lead the way on this, in different a way from Europe.