Privacy is increasingly in the public eye as dominant platforms often seek to disguise discriminatory conduct that harms competition using “privacy fixing” language.
MOW supports the purpose listed in the Abstract of the W3C Privacy Principles (“Principles”), namely “people using the Web would benefit from a stronger relationship between technology and policy” that ought to “guide the development of the Web as a trustworthy platform.”
Disappointingly, many of the definitions and related concepts in the rest of the document do not help advance these noble goals and erode consumer sovereignty. The document repeats unsubstantiated positions from large publishers and internet gatekeepers that claim to protect people’s important privacy rights, but do not.
As such, MOW has produced an in-depth commentary, which identifies areas of alignment between MOW and these authors, while also highlighting areas where the current language raises serious risks to competition across the Open Web.
You can access the full document in PDF form here.
Header image courtesy of Linhao Qu via Unsplash (Licensed for free use under the Unsplash License)