‘Everyone responsible for using personal data has to follow strict rules called ‘data protection principles’ unless an exemption applies.’
gov.uk, explaining GDPR
What do you do when confronted with that annoying ‘Cookie and Privacy Notice’ challenge which stops you entering a website for the first time? According to Performance Marketing World, 56% of UK consumers admit to always accepting cookies in full.
Whether your reason is not to be distracted by yet another technical process, or whether it’s as a result of not understanding the consequences of allowing full access, your acceptance opens an unlimited door to the exploitation of your data and your downstream internet usage.
Whether regulators really understood the extent to which tech businesses can drill into our personal interests and mine our data when they first introduced GDPR (General Data Protection Regulations), who can tell? But there's no doubting the fact that it provides very little practical protection; tech giants are running rings around GDPR.
Artificial Intelligence (AI), meanwhile, has significantly increased the challenge for data protection: it has allowed individuals’ data and creativity to be dissolved almost without a trace, as Philip Pullman complained last week while launching the next book in his ‘Book of Dust’ series, ‘The Rose Field’.
As Emma Duncan commented in the Times on 29th August, this absorption of data and creativity into untameable tech vibrancy is inevitable — but it's also resulting in massive polarisation of wealth.
The theory of data protection assumed that we can beat these forces: it's now proven that we can't.
We would therefore do better to find ways of joining them by sharing in their wealth creation.
However, there are also people who suffer unknowingly from Government’s restrictive treatment of GDPR. Its approach towards data protection is currently denying hundreds of thousands of young people access to money that is rightfully theirs, by not allowing the automatic release of Child Trust Funds in their own name: more about this later.
—> please READ ON ..
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