Privacy fundamentalism, which does not consider the inherent nature of the internet and the unavoidable trade-offs, is a surefire way to get policy wrong
and this is exactly the kind of fallout we're preventing with our Privacy Sandbox proposal. https://stratechery.com/... Will Oremus / @willoremus : This makes some fine points on the micro level. But on the macro level it strikes me as backward to be inveighing against “privacy absolutism” at a time when the status quo is ubiquitous online surveillance, permanent data storage, rampant deception, and zero regulation. Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life : The privacy trend being pushed by tech press and Apple's Safari that cookies are bad and should be blocked reminds me of GDPR. If every browser blocks 3rd party scripts & cookies, smaller sites & publishers will be hurt way more than big web properties https://stratechery.com/... Mustapha Hamoui / @beirutspring : Fantastic insight by @benthompson Apple's privacy violation with Siri was snuck behind our backs because the company has a fundamentalist attitude to privacy (via @Techmeme) https://stratechery.com/... https://twitter.com/... Can Duruk / @can : My 2 cents: Builds a straw man of Apple and WebKit. We don't know what will fully break with Safari's new cross-site tracking prevention. And moreover, it assumes WebKit won't allow new ways to fix those problems. Weaker than usual for Stratechery. https://twitter.com/... Joshua Hoover / @joshuahoover : “...technology can be used for both good things and bad things, but in the haste to highlight the bad, it is easy to be oblivious to the good.” https://stratechery.com/... Rick Tetzeli / @tetzeli : Picking apart a @fmanjoo @nytimes piece, Ben Thompson nails it on privacy: It's easy to turn the Internet into a villain by reimagine its basic mechanisms as monsters. A popular form of fear mongering. https://stratechery.com/... via @stratechery Rahul Matthan / @matthan : The default state of the Internet is the endless propagation and collection of data: you have to do work to not collect data. Privacy Fundamentalism https://stratechery.com/... Josh Sternberg / @joshsternberg : “online privacy in particular should not be the end-all be-all but rather one part of a difficult set of trade-offs that need to be made when it comes to dealing with this new reality that is the Internet. Being an absolutist will lead to bad policy” https://stratechery.com/... Jesse Blumenthal / @jessekblum : BREAKING!! -Tradeoffs are real -'Privacy' shouldn't be an absolute value -Beware hyperbolic rhetoric Exhibit A: the NYT “or perhaps Manjoo, as seems to so often be the case with privacy scare pieces, has overstated his case by a massive degree.” https://stratechery.com/... Alex Collmer / @collmerica : This is a great piece from @benthompson. So often, complex questions require nuanced analyses, and our hot-take world seems less and less willing to think things through fully...and honestly. https://stratechery.com/... Anjali Ramachandran / @anjali28 : Worth reading this by @benthompson. I'm definitely for more transparency on the part of big tech behemoths who vacuum up personal data for their gain, but if you run your own business via your website like Ben does, it's not B&W.I'd love to hear thoughts. https://stratechery.com/... Stephen diFilipo / @s_df : Privacy Fundamentalism - Stratechery by Ben Thompson http://pllqt.it/8BuQhr via @philonedtech pic.twitter.com/tb4o5CIutt Edward Nevraumont / @ednever : Ben beat me to it. I had something like this in my queue to write. I have a slightly different take so maybe it will happen someday. Privacy Fundamentalism - Stratechery https://stratechery.com/... Dhruv / @tractiontandon : Privacy: you get almost as much as you give. So should you really be a fundamentalist about it? Read this now! https://stratechery.com/... @davealbright : A visual depiction of your web use as it's seen by google analytics and other tracking software - is the picture worth a thousand words to reform web privacy? Privacy Fundamentalism - Stratechery by Ben Thompson https://stratechery.com/... Valentino Volonghi / @dialtone_ : https://stratechery.com/... yeah... Too bad the current environment isn't up for any discussion since pitchforks have already been sharpened and torches are blazing. Antonio Garca Martnez / @antoniogm : I've given up screaming into the pointless privacy tornado, but this @benthompson piece on @fmanjoo's third-party tracker exploration is (per usual) an oasis of reason in a desert of stupidity. https://stratechery.com/... Stephen Pimentel / @stephenpiment : Journalists have fallen into a sloppy framework in which some basic web technology and business models have been coded as “bad,” leading to incoherent critiques. This Stratechery piece unpacks some of that. Privacy Fundamentalism https://stratechery.com/... Jason Kint / @jason_kint : Good of @fmanjoo to retweet critique. I actually think Farhad got most of his piece right. And pinning argument on GDPR is helping Google/Facebook can't be supported by data especially with enforcement just now starting to roll-out w Dixon decisions expected in next months. /1 https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Ben Thompson's 'Privacy Fundamentalism' lands two months after the ambient-privacy argument that everyday interactions are being remembered at scale — the same status quo Will Oremus cites when he calls Thompson's anti-absolutism case backward. The disagreement is really about who sets the default: Thompson points to Google's Privacy Sandbox proposal as the way to manage trade-offs, while Dare Obasanjo reads Apple's Safari cookie-blocking and the tech press as pushing a GDPR-style turn.
The stakes are structural because, as earlier coverage noted, businesses have collected and resold personal data for decades — Google and Facebook only made it visible through better targeting (that history frames whether blocking cookies fixes anything or just reshuffles who sees the data).
First-order effects
- Google's Privacy Sandbox makes Google the proposed arbiter of the web's privacy trade-offs at the exact moment Apple's Safari is already enforcing its own answer by blocking cookies.
- Ad-dependent publishers and ad-tech intermediaries face immediate uncertainty about which standard wins, since browser defaults — not legislation — are currently deciding what tracking is possible.
Second-order effects
- If browsers keep writing de facto privacy rules, proposals like Privacy Sandbox entrench the platforms that control them — the conflict between privacy and competition Benedict Evans later mapped in privacy-versus-competition proposals.
- Regulators weighing GDPR-style rules get their framing contested by both sides: Thompson warns absolutism produces bad policy, while Oremus counters that zero regulation plus ubiquitous surveillance is itself a policy choice.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward web standards and privacy norms being set by a handful of browser/platform vendors rather than by legislatures, with competition consequences baked into every technical decision.
- If the trade-off framing holds, expect recurring fights — like the later CSAM-scanning design debate over on-device versus server-side scanning — where where a measurement happens determines who controls it.
The trend: Privacy policy for the open web is migrating from legislatures to platform vendors, with each browser-level change quietly redrawing the competitive map.