Ever since the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Panopticlick initiative in 2010, I’ve been sensitized to the risks and potential harms that come from adtech’s tracking of consumers. Indeed, in the years since, it has gotten far far worse. People are only now discovering the bad stuff that has been going on.

  “For true, lasting privacy, we must shift from the ‘privacy policies’ of companies, which spring from data protection laws, to the ‘privacy’ of individual persons, as contemplated by human rights laws.” How do we accomplish this shift? TL;DR (in summary)

There's a new side to choose. It helps that each of us is already on it. Linux Journal was born in one fight and grew through a series of others. Our first fight was for freedom. That began in 1993, when Phil Hughes started work toward a free software magazine. The fight for free software was still there when that magazine was born as Linux Journal in April 1994. Then a second fight began. That one was against all forms of closed and proprietary software, including the commercial UNIX variants that Linux would eventually defeat. We got in the fight for open source starting in 1998. (In 2005, I got a ribbon for my own small part in that battle.) And last year, we began our fight against what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism, and Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger call re-engineering humanity.

Shoshana Zuboff's new book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism goes into gory details of how companies collect, use, buy and sell your data for profit, often without consent or even the consumer knowing it was happening, until disasters reveal some of the dark underbelly—like the Cambridge Analytica scandal. But, I’m a marketer, so I will focus on the subset of “surveillance marketing”—also known as “digital marketing”—where companies profit off of you, because they are set up to do so.

Good question. That's what people say when they don't have an answer yet. And such is the case with the question in the headline. I started wondering about it following  a tweeted response by Raouf Eldeeb (@raouf777) to Privacy is Personal: It is also a fundamental right, not a privilege to be bestowed on anyone. The individual should have the right to determine the extent of his privacy.

First came branding through sponsorship. Then came eyeball-chasing through adtech. Now comes sponsorship again, this time supporting a mission as big as Linux. This editorial is my first and only sales pitch. It's for brands to sponsor Linux Journal. I'm also not just speaking as a magazine editor. I've studied advertising from inside and out for longer than most people have been alive.

Finding that Facebook has "data sharing partnerships" with "at least sixty device makers" is as unsurprising as finding that there are a zillion ways to use wheat or corn. Facebook is in the data farming business. Remember that the GDPR didn't happen in a vacuum. Bad acting with personal data in the adtech business (the one that aims advertising with personal data) is the norm, not the exception.

The GDPR is breaking advertising apart.  Never mind the specifics of the regulation. Just look at the effects. Among those, two are obvious and everywhere: 1) opt-back-in emails and 2) "consent walls" in front of websites. Both of those misdirect attention away from how an entire branch of advertising ignored a simple moral principle that has long applied in the offline world: tracking people without their knowledge, approval or a court order is just flat-out wrong.

[24 May 2019: A year after I wrote this post, Global Consent Manager an indirect descendant of the work described below, is in the world and doing the job. Check 'em out.] The web—or at least the one we know today—got off on the wrong hoofs. Specifically, I mean with client-server, a distributed application structure that shouldn't subordinate one party to an other, but ended up doing exactly that, which is why the web today looks like this:

First we invented a world where everyone could be free. Then we helped build feudal castles on it, where everyone now lives. Now it's time to blow up those castles by giving everybody much better ways to use their freedom than they ever would enjoy in a castle. I'm going to mix movie metaphors here. You'll see why.

Since the turn of the millennium, online publishing has turned into a vampire, sucking the blood of readers' personal data to feed the appetites of adtech: tracking-based advertising. Resisting that temptation nearly killed us. But now that we're alive, still human and stronger than ever, we want to lead the way toward curing the rest of online publishing from the curse of personal-data vampirism. And we have a plan. Read on.