All current regulations about online privacy are flawed because they view privacy as a thing that needs protecting, rather than a trade-off for benefits
It's been an interesting year for those of us who support strong privacy for the public — in part because we've seen lots of movement on attempts to regulate privacy. Tweets: @chris_heine and @mmasnick Tweets: Christopher Heine / @chris_heine : A good read on online privacy, the poor approach of regulators and the culpability of digital platforms from @mmasnick: https://www.techdirt.com/... Mike Masnick / @mmasnick : With so many attempts to regulate privacy, I'm afraid they'll all flop because our understanding of privacy itself is very flawed. http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Mike Masnick's argument lands mid-wave: 2018 saw heavy movement on privacy regulation, and his claim is that every attempt rests on a broken premise — treating privacy as an asset to wall off rather than a trade-off against services users actually want. A year later, Stratechery's critique of privacy fundamentalism made the same structural point: policy that ignores the internet's inherent data flows gets the rules wrong.
The surrounding coverage keeps testing the trade-off frame from both sides. Researchers trying to price privacy keep getting irreconcilable numbers, per OneZero's look at valuation studies — evidence that 'how much is privacy worth' may be the wrong question. And when France asked Google and Apple to relax protections for its contact-tracing app, a vocal tech critic revealed how quickly governments themselves trade privacy for benefits when the benefit feels urgent.
First-order effects
- Regulators pursuing notice-and-consent-style rules are building on a model Masnick predicts will flop, since no user can meaningfully evaluate a privacy policy as a terms sheet rather than a trade-off.
- Digital platforms — which Heine and Masnick both flag as culpable — gain an argumentative shield: if all privacy is traded away for benefits, platform blame shifts toward the regulatory framework itself.
Second-order effects
- Compliance regimes built on consent walls push publishers and lawmakers toward design-level fixes instead, like the Washington Post's case for laws and tech that give users real choices rather than unread policies.
- Governments' own behavior — demanding exceptions for public-health apps while prosecuting platforms for the same data practices — hands platforms a hypocrisy argument in every future enforcement fight.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, privacy law migrates from absolute-protection framing toward explicit trade-off accounting, with policymakers forced to name what benefit justifies each data collection — a harder but more honest legislative task.
- The failure of dollar-valuation research suggests the field settles on qualitative choice architecture over monetized consent, reshaping what 'compliance' even means for platforms.
The trend: Privacy policymaking is slowly shifting from protecting privacy as an absolute to pricing and designing its trade-offs, with each flawed regulation and government exception marking another step.