The endless cookie settings that pop up for every website feel a bit like prank compliance by an internet hell-bent on not changing. It is very annoying. And it feels a little bit like revenge on regulators by the data markets, giving the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) a bad name and so that it might seem like political bureaucrats have, once again, clumsily interfered with the otherwise smooth progress of innovation.
The truth is, however, that the vision of privacy put forward by the GDPR would spur a far more exciting era of innovation than current-day sleaze-tech. As it stands today, however, it simply falls short of doing so. What is needed is an infrastructural approach with the right incentives. Let me explain.
Jaya Klara Brekke is the chief strategy officer at Nym, a global decentralized privacy project. She is a research fellow at the Weizenbaum Institute, has a Ph.D. from Durham University Geography Department on the politics of blockchain protocols, and is an occasional expert adviser to the European Commission on distributed ledger technology. She speaks, writes and conducts research on privacy, power and the political economies of decentralized systems.