Nice idea, but it remains to be seen whether it gets anywhere and, even if it does, how much it achieves. The problem with criminals is that they ignore the Law — that’s why they’re criminals. So, I’m not overly confident that saying “I do not authorise you to sell my data” will be that much more effective than “Please don’t sell my data” — criminals will simply laugh as they ignore me. And even if most, or even all, sites do honour it, there’s still the aspect of criminals being prepared to sell what data they do get their hands on and/or for aggregators to sell correlated datasets — the technology is cheap, so it’s just a matter of paying for the data (prices will go up, but the market won’t disappear).
At the end of the day, relying on others to be nice and play fair is a lovely ideal and I hope this gains traction but, even if it does, I’ll still be sticking to the approach of creating trails/clouds of misinformation and disinformation:
Just as the only way to not get (someone) pregnant is not to have sex, the only way not to have your data used against you is to not generate it in the first place but … failing that … to generate fake data — you can collect as much as you like … so long as it’s fake, it can’t do me any harm, no matter who gets their hands on it. So, as far as I’m concerned, bring it on by all means ... I’ll quite possibly make use of the feature on myself, so long as there’s no reason not to (like it can be used to profile me in the same way enabling DNT can ¹)… but I’ll use it in addition to my current strategies, not in place of them.
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¹ Which is why Apple removed it from Safari.
