Lessig Warns Privacy Pros to Stop Enabling Engagement Business Model
Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig challenged privacy professionals at the IAPP Global Policy Summit to “think about how to build a privacy law to give us the right to be left alone again.”
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“Why not build a society that I think all of us wants, rather than enabling the consent architecture that [the] engagement business model needs?” he said in a keynote Wednesday. “Because if you did that, I think the world would forgive you for the pop-ups.”
Lessig also criticized companies’ overly long terms of service. “No one has read this except you,” he told the audience of privacy pros. Few who read the policies understand them, he added. “Why is it good that we’re forcing us to pretend to lie? Why is it OK that we force us to live life lying just to be able to experience the internet?”
Businesses today have a model of inducing users to reveal more data about themselves by increasing engagement, Lessig said. The model has serious consequences, including addiction and social and political effects, he warned.
“The most profitable strategy to drive engagement turns out to be the politics of hate,” he said. “AI learns that, so that’s what we’re fed. … ‘We, the people’ become ‘we, the polarized, ignorant and angry' -- and democracy is thereby weakened.”