this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2026
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How about passing a law that makes it illegal to sell any of someone's data without express written consent for each sale.
And it’s explicitly opt-in, not opt-out.
It's argued it already is opt-in. That's the 'Agree' button.
I just got a text from my cell service saying they changed the terms of service, and I agree if I continue to use the service and privacy notive. Not even an agree button anymore just a FYI
Yep. "You must consent otherwise you're opting out of everything in existence and must go live in a cave." It's not consent if they didn't even ask, and it's not consent if you want to say no but there's literally no other option in existence. Just opt out of the whole internet and mobile phones I guess.
I'm glad we have options here in Europe. Not many, but there are at least 3 mobile and internet providers at my location, so whenever one tries to pull something like this, I just call them that I'm switching providers. I've netted a permanent 50% discount and even managed to convince them to keep the discount at my old flat (which was a student's shared flat where my friends still live) and also transfer it to my new home I have with my partner.
As far as I know, they can give you massive discounts, but you have to be willing to go through hell and run into a good call operator.
But also, that was like 10 years ago and I didn't need to do it again. I can imagine that in the age of clankers, things may be a lot different (also with the transition to late-stage capitalism and enshittification).
Dark patterns and dark intentions
Kinda what GDPR tried and now the internet is almost unusable because greedy companies put cookie banners on every fucking site
What is there to be worried about? We just want to collect valid data for our operations and to share with our 21,678 partners. It's basically legitimate interest.
It's financial interest that we as users should be earning
At least a portion
And what most websites doing is actually not allowed according to the GDPR, it's supposed to be a one-click opt-out. Unfortunately, the relevant court is in Ireland, which is the EU's hub for US big tech.
and it made the situation several orders of magnitude worse.
before you just used your favorite plugin and be done with it. you can't do that anymore, because you now have to allow for a cookie saying you don't want their cookies and you have to trust them to respect that. if that cookie is not there, they will bother you for the rest of their lives.
that is ignoring that you would have to individually opt out of every single one of their one million legitimate business partners.
i am using the ublock origin to block the dialogs, but it unfortunately works highly unreliably.
Yeah this is just whack-a-mole.
Multibillion dollar business idea: shitload of shell companies that keep your data constantly in circulation, undeletable. Subscription service that just re-sends your data to companies after deletion.
cool idea, except i am pretty sure you are late to the market and someone is already doing that 😂
And with a required minimum percentage of those data sales going to the individual.