If you’ve been on the internet before, you’ve probably seen them: the unintelligible Terms of Service, the Privacy Policies that bury their practices under thousands of lines of legal jargon, the popups informing you that you’re being tracked. And yet, not knowing what you’re agreeing to, you click Accept.
It’s not just you. Even American Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts said he doesn’t read the privacy policies on all the websites he visits— even though those terms have held up as legally binding in court.
Your data is being gathered and sold in increasingly new ways that don’t often benefit you. Forget the old narrative of just improving targeted advertisements— your health data, your browsing history, and your location information is being sold to insurance companies, mortgage brokers, and your landlords, affecting your life in very real ways. This data is being used to determine crucial parts of your life such as the rates you pay for healthcare, the custody of your children, and whether or not you are hired for a job. In more and more ways, we all become data points in a cluster of billions where our futures are determined by the data points around us. There are many companies that exist solely to gather and sell massive amounts of data, and there is no regulation surrounding their behavior or what they are able to do with your data.
On January 1st, 2020, the first major data privacy bill in the US, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) came into effect. The law gives California residents the right to learn what data companies collect about them. It also lets Californians ask companies to delete their data and not to sell it. Many companies honor CCPA for all consumers, not just those residing in California.
Before it went into effect, companies weren't legally required to tell you what data they'd collected about you, and you had little say over what they did with your personal data. Now you’re able to ask them to delete your data and request that they stop selling it. But CCPA doesn’t regulate what companies are able to do with your data.
However, there are many ways that companies may be able to get around CCPA. One common rebuttal is that companies may not technically sell your data; they sell the insights they can derive from your data. Another loophole is around the definitions of ‘personal data’ and what constitutes as ‘personally identifiable information.‘ Another issue yet is that some companies have just not turned off tracking, despite the new law.
Many privacy advocates have suggested we need a strong national data regulation policy. Only three states have data privacy laws of their own, and national regulations have been drafted but not yet passed. Unfortunately, national regulation is far from becoming policy, and until we decide that enough is enough and change the laws to ban these practices, there’s only one way to stay safe:
Be smart about who you choose to give your data to.
We Sell Your Data is a project by Bay Area artist Sarah Dapul-Weberman. And no, we don’t actually sell your data.