General data-protection frameworks cannot challenge extractive data economies.

Evidence

The GDPR changes the rules under which data colonialism operates but leaves unchallenged the commercial purposes for which data is collected. There is also a question about the limits of the “informed consent” principle on which the GDPR relies; this principle is dependent on how situations of consent are configured in everyday life. It is hard to see how this, or any similar general framework that we might imagine, would challenge an environment in which consent to data collection and processing is overridden by the bargaining power of employers or insurers. Meanwhile, it is super-powerful incumbents such as Google that are arguably best placed to bear the costs of adjusting their business to GDPR rules. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 555

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallel to the structural critique that legal regulation cannot fix surveillance capitalism since it leaves the underlying commercial extraction model intact. — connects to: Opaque data systems are arbitrary because their goals cannot be reflexively integrated — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 521; Large-scale health-data aggregation can escape existing legal medical protections — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 529; Privacy as a term remains necessary but insufficient against data exploitation. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 1167 (+5 more)
• SEED: A possible essay: why every general data-protection law will fail by design, because informed consent cannot survive employer or insurer bargaining power.

Broader Connections

• Privacy protections are structurally incompatible with surveillance capitalism’s accumulation logic #expands (0.90) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 601
• Antitrust regulation will not curb surveillance-capitalist extraction #corroborates (0.88) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 420
• Privacy as a term remains necessary but insufficient against data exploitation. #expands (0.85) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 1167
• Property-based and data-portability arguments for privacy have limits and alternatives #corroborates (0.85) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 1101
• Paying users for their data would not remedy the harms of continuous surveillance #corroborates (0.82) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 780
• The key platform struggle is denaturalizing data abstraction, not securing payment for data #corroborates (0.80) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 781