The end of privacy

The business model that sustains most of the free internet is targeted advertising. For that targeting to work, platforms need to know who their users are, what interests them, when they are active, what they buy, what they search for, who they communicate with. Personal information is the raw material. And for two decades, users handed over that raw material in exchange for free email, maps, social networks and search engines.

The implicit contract was not secret, but it was not transparent either. Terms and conditions of service, which no one reads, articulate waivers of rights that would be unthinkable in any other context. The magnitude of the data collected only became visible gradually, with leaks like Cambridge Analytica or the Snowden documents on government surveillance. By then, the data collection infrastructure was already a fundamental part of the digital economy.

Regulatory responses exist and have teeth: the European GDPR imposed billion-dollar fines on platforms like Meta and Google. But the business model did not change in substance; what changed was the management of consent. Privacy as a real right, not as an option selectable from cookie menus, requires deeper structural changes that still do not have political majority anywhere in the world.