Privacy should be the default

Every time you open a webpage a cookie policy statement appears with two main options, accept and cookie settings. Using design principles our brain is driven to click the accept button and in case you are one of the few people interested in disabling the cookies, they make it really hard to disable performance, social media, advertising, functional, analytic, and so on cookies that in the long run, you prefer just to accept them all.

These cookies are small files used to monitor you and remember certain information about you and are able to track you as you browse the internet they are one of the many examples of the failures of online privacy and access and resell to users’ data.

The website's cookie pop-up to accept or decline cookies is the outcome of two different regulations” the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the ePrivacy Directive but these noble attempts have been proven ineffective and have just damaged your internet experience with all the pop-ups.

For a user you are given two choices “Track me” or “Don’t track me” with the default being “Track me”, even as I write this I feel like been invaded, every-day I visit tens of websites, each one of the tracking and keeping my data, reselling it to third parties, generating a profile of me so they can target me with the best adds according to this small sample of information they acquire because I was lazy enough to just accept all cookies.

Privacy should be the default when a product or service is released to the public, the strictest privacy settings should apply by default, any personal data given by the user should only be kept the amount of time required and we as internet users should not expect less than this.

Researching for this blog post I found this beautiful irony.