My train of thought on this topic was prompted by this protonmail blog post about Alphabet/Google’s use of lobbying money around the world to influence privacy legislation. The article asserts that Alphabet spent more that $125 million on lobbying since 2019, and further asserts that they used those funds to block or defang various data privacy and consumer protection laws. I have not validated either of these claims, but find them plausible enough to accept the premise and move on.

An Analogy

On its face, this seems worthy of legitimate outrage. Or at least an invocation of “don’t hate the player, hate the game”. Instead, I suggest this situation is similar to any other where we are presented with a problem with government presented as the solution to that problem. One analogy that leapt to my mind is labor.

The generally accepted narrative is that workers were de facto peasants, with no recourse against greedy, mustache-twirling robber barons who delighted in disfiguring them in their horrible machines. And therefore, government intervention on behalf of labor was required in order to balance the scales, to set right what once went wrong.

In reality what we got was another centralization of power in the superstructure of unions and a restriction of the rights of individuals to accept or reject contracts, a loss of freedom of association. In the name of righting past wrongs, present wrongs are justified. I think we can all agree that there were legitimate complaints coming from laborers, but that domesticating their interests in service of the political machine did nothing the alleviate these grievances.

In the end, the unions became another trusted third party.

Shitcoinery

The term “x is a shitcoin”, the Bitcoin community’s favorite snowclone flavor, is well understood implicitly. Stating it more explicitly, the statement can be cashed out as something like “x is not worthy of trusting and/or doesn’t solve the problem you think it does”. Hence “Ethereum is a shitcoin” is understood to be a critique of the heavily centralized, top down organization of Ethereum relative to Bitcoin.

So when I say “privacy laws are a shitcoin”, I mean that: privacy laws both can’t be trusted and don’t do what you think they do. Instead of further enabling a universal zero trust model where are individuals are ultimately responsible for their own digital sovereignty, privacy laws present as a trusted third party, there to take some of the burden from you, seeing to your best interests with respect to your data. Even though the the privacy law may seem just and coherent now, it is just another attack surface for the political class to use. The interpretation and targeting of the powers granted to those bodies which enforce these laws can and does change depending on the party in power and the party in the spotlight of the laws. While we may not feel a special kinship to the monster tech platforms, neither should we feel protected by new government powers to bless some actions as legal and other illegal.

Don’t trust, verify: privacy laws are a shitcoin.