Taming the abuses of the wild wild web

Emma Duncan The Times

All over the country, lawyers are toasting each other in “magnums of Château d’yquem”, says Emma Duncan. They’re going to clean up advising companies on new, bafflingly complex EU regulations governing what companies can do with our online data. And we too should raise a glass to the arrival of this “regulatory juggernaut”. No more will outfits like Cambridge Analytica be able to harvest the details of millions of Facebook users. Under the General Data Protection Regulation, companies will need our explicit consent to sell on our data; they’ll have to be hotter on security issues; and they’ll have to enforce our “right to be forgotten”, deleting things we wish we hadn’t put on the web – they’ll face huge fines if they don’t. Yes, there are downsides: small companies will find it hard to absorb the cost of compliance, so it will restrict competition and entrench the power of the very corporations who’ve been taking advantage of us. Yet slowing the advance of the tech industry is no bad thing. Humans just aren’t designed to adapt to very rapid change. I, for one, could use a pause before lurching into whatever “fresh hell” artificial intelligence has in store for us.