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We should not try to achieve consumer protection via laws, like GDPR, that bureaucratically regiment private interaction. Consumer protection should be promote
by ETH_start 4y ago
We should not try to achieve consumer protection via laws, like GDPR, that bureaucratically regiment private interaction.
Consumer protection should be promoted through technological means, e.g the EU could have funded development of fingerprintless browser technologies, zero-knowledge proof based identity verification, etc, instead of through GDPR.
- p-e-w 4y ago(Largely) fingerprintless browsers exist: Just use Firefox and enable the "resist fingerprinting" setting. If you do, you will find that large parts of the web become unusable, with CAPTCHAs and challenges everywhere, some of them too difficult for even a human to solve. That's why we need laws.
- ETH_start 4y agoThat again is a technological problem. Web infrastructure providers rely on CAPTCHAs because nothing better exists once you take away browser fingerprints. Zero-knowledge authentication would enable a browser to prove to a server that it's being used by a legitimate user without compromising privacy or forcing its user to perform CAPTCHAs. But these technologies cost money to develop, and this is where the government can step in. The cost, while great, should be compared to the labor and innovation costs of imposing regulatory straightjackets like GDPR on everyone, which are hard to measure, but undoubtedly enormous in the aggregate given the pervasiveness of their effects.