Hartzog: Everyone emphasizes "control" of personal data as core to privacy. It seems to be the one principle that everyone can agree on. It is the dominant privacy goal of PbD efforts. #DPC18
BUT, says Hartzog, "Control is the wrong goal for privacy by design, perhaps the wrong goal for data protection in general." Too much zeal for control dilutes efforts to design information tech correctly. #dpc18
Hartzog: This idealized idea of control is impossible. Control is illusory. It's a shell game. It's mediated and engineered to produce a particular control. Design is everything. #DPC18
Hartzog: Companies basically do what I do with my kids: Give us only the choices they want you to choose. No one says, "hey, do you want all the candy you can eat?" #DPC18
Hartzog: The essence of design is to nudge us into choices. Asking companies to engineer user control incentivizes self-dealing at the margins. Even when good intentioned, companies ultimately act in their own self interests. #DPC18
Hartzog: Even if there were some kind of perfected control interface, there is still a mind-boggling number of companies with which users have to interact. How could you meaningful control all those relationships? #DPC18
Hartzog: When control is the north star, company leaders and lawmakers aren't left with much to work with. It's not clear that more control and more choices are actually going to help us. #DPC18
Hartzog: What is the end game we're actually hoping for with control? If data processing is so dangerous that we need these complicated controls, maybe we should just not allow the processing at all? #DPC18
Hartzog to lawmakers: Stop forcing complex control burdens on citizens, make real rules that mandate deletion or forbid collection in the first place for high risk activities. #dpc18
