As an aside, I just wanted to give a shout out to the GDPR. There was a lot of well deserved suspicion for that piece of legislation, and it’s obviously not perfect (and in fact has a lot of flaws). But as the large number of comments here referencing it indicate, it’s probably the second effective tool for user privacy that has been made available so far, the first probably being ad/trackers blocking extensions. And unfortunately it’s pretty clear with the browsers being owned largely by ad companies, these extensions are not gonna be useful for too long.

Also, as someone who was heavily involved in student government in college, I’m absolutely stunned and amazed at the legislation that manages to come out of the EU, which is structured like a Kafkaesque nightmare, and yet, somehow, manages to churn out better legislation than pretty much any other legislative body on the planet.