Google Makes You Jump Through Hidden Hoops To Get Their Service To Stop Tracking Your Movements -- But Then Still Continues Tracking Your Movements, Even After You've Jumped All the Hoops

In Soviet Russia, you inform on yourself.

Lawmakers called out Google on Tuesday at a Senate hearing on data privacy, pointing out how many hoops average people need to jump through to stop the tech giant from tracking them.

Google lets people opt out of location and data tracking, and notes that people consent to providing their data by agreeing to its privacy policy.

Sen. John Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana, criticized Google's privacy policy, telling Will DeVries, the company's senior privacy counsel, that the average person doesn't read those documents.

"You can hide a dead body in there and nobody would ever find it," Kennedy said at the hearing.

...

"Our current notice and consent model is broken," Michelle Richardson, the Privacy and Data project director at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said in her opening remarks...

Opt-in consent means you have to agree to all uses of your data before it's collected...

Opt-out consent is the current status quo, where people's data is collected by default if they use a service, forcing them to go to their privacy settings to shut off the data gathering.

"There is significant evidence that defaults are sticky, and consumers rarely alter their default privacy settings," said Sen. Mazie Hirono, a Democrat from Hawaii. "The privacy regime should be an opt-in."

Via Ed Driscoll at Instapundit, who includes this quote:

"'They [customers] think they can opt out of the tracking you're performing, but they can’t meaningfully opt out," [Senator] Hawley said. 'It's kind of like that old Eagles song, 'You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.'"

Are "conservatives" finally starting to side with their voters' interests rather than with their (leftwing) corporate donors' interests? Is Hawley serious or just Hollywoodin' for the rubes?

We'll have to see.

Honest people don't need to hide the terms of the service they're enlisting you into.

posted by Ace of Spades at 07:02 PM

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