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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

The privacy battle has to be at the legal layer. GDPR is far from perfect (bureaucratic and unclear with weak enforcement), but it's a step in the right direction.

In an adversarial environment, especially with both AI scrapers and AI posters, websites have to be able to identify and ban persistent abusers. Which unfortunately implies having some kind of identification of everybody.

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No, it's more than that. Cloudflare's bot protection has blocked me from sites where I have a paid account, paid for by my real checking account with my real name attached. Even when I am perfectly willing to give out my identity and be tracked, I still can't because I can't even get to the login page.

They block such visits because their pragma suspects that your visit is the account of a real human that was hacked by a bot.

You notice that Analogue Devices puts their (incredibly useful) information up for free. That's because they make money other ways. Ad supported content farm Internet had a nice run but we will get on without it.

That's another problem, we want cheap easy solutions like tracking people, instead of more targetteed or systemic ones.

> The privacy battle has to be at the legal layer.

I couldn't disagree more. The way to protect privacy is to make privacy the standard at the implementation layer, and to make it costly and difficult to breach it.

Trying to rely on political institutions without the practical and technical incentives favoring privacy will inevitably result in the political institutions themselves becoming the main instrument that erodes privacy.

Yet without regulation nothing stops large companies from simply changing the implementation layer for one that pads their bottom line better, or just rebuild it from scratch.

If people who valued privacy really controlled the implementation layer we wouldn't have gotten to this point in the first place.

The point we're at is one in which privacy is still attainable via implementation-layer measures, even if it requires investing some effort and making some trade-offs to sustain. The alternative -- placing trust in regulation, which never works in the long run -- will inevitably result in regulatory capture that eliminates those remaining practical measures and replaces them with, at best, a performative illusion.

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