Open your browser. Browse Click Most of us believe that if we avoid logging in or starting special features, our activity remains private. But a federal court in California Shattered that perception Last month.
The case brought by CHROME users, it alleged that Google continued to collect personal data, when users, especially chosen to not sync their chrome browsers with the Google account, is believed to have many perfectly believed that their digital footprints will keep out of the company’s hands.
The court did not question whether the data was collected. Instead, it was focused on whether users really agreed. District Judge Yavon Gonzalez Rogers concluded, as users faced separate privacy terms or were understood differently, they could not sue as a group.
Legally, this result fits with the established rule that class functions require a shared legal or factual threads. But when it comes to digital secrecy, that streamlined legal argument creates a disturbed imbalance. The rule requires everyone’s privacy perceptions, which acts as a clever exercise, which changes the disturbances of how people face privacy policies in a shield against accountability.
The entire online privacy regime rests on the legal imagination that when we click on “I agree”, we understood and accepted what comes next. But users face these policies, they rarely read them and often try, even if they can try.
This disconnect is not an accident. The consent of privacy was never to inform users. This was designed to operate data collection and adapt to convenience, speed and scale.
The irony emerges when users try to push back. At that point, the same system that considers a mindless click as a meaningful legal consent demands a sudden forensic-level expansion that every person saw, understood and agreed.
In the Google case, the court, which easily accepted the imagination of digital consent, became deeply concerned with the reality of digital experiences. Very users who were completely similar when clicking “I agree” were now very different to challenge the agreement together.
This is the great fodder-and-switch of the privacy law: we are all together while accepting the surveillance, but on our own when demanding accountability.
It leaves users in an impossible bind. When the lawsuits of class action fails because the consent changes back to the individual relevant act, the users can only go alone. But this is a dead end. Personal privacy cases are almost never. The injuries they try to address are spread and abstract, from hyper-targeted advertisements to the aggressive and algorithm decision, which quietly discriminate against the uncertainty that our lives are being seen very closely.
These are the disadvantages that it matters, but they are difficult to convert into legal claims and still difficult to translate into dollars.
Class action exists to bridge this difference. They scattered, often take invisible harm to modern digital surveillance and turn them into some admirers for courts. Class action makes it financially viable to represent people without power for lawyers, and they are just threatening companies to think twice before crossing the line.
This enforcement crisis reflects a deeper choice that we encounter how power is operated in the digital age. We can continue to show off that privacy is preserved by a wide theater of clicks clicks, which no one studies, privacy policies that no one understands and legal stories fail to serve those they claim to protect. Or we can create a privacy structure that takes the context seriously, a attention that recognizes the structural imbalance between users and platforms, a attention needs a collective mechanism to challenge the impossibility and abuse of meaningful consent in the economy.
The Google case will probably not be remembered what he has decided, but for inequality it suggests that our legal system treats consent. Failing that inequality does not mean to pursue the consent story. This means to pursue it completely. Privacy security should not host whether someone has clicked a box, but should reflect the realities of strength, reference and social expectations.
If we will not be committed to a framework that takes those realities seriously, very at least we should use selective reference to users to mold users from accountability by getting exposed to harmful data practices.
Yafit Lev-Amtez, Baruch College, City University of New York is an associate professor of law.
