ID Tracking or How Privacy strengthens Monopolies

• Dr. Jana Moser

Companies and authorities – legally or otherwise – collect and use personally identifiable information, in a fact continuously reported in the last month’s news. Consequently, nowadays almost everyone has an opinion about data protection and how to protect ones privacy. However, the discussions about regulating online data processing mechanisms already increased heavily in Europe years ago. One of the most famous topics was the so-called cookie directive, i. e. the legal requirement of prior “consent” to drop cookies and use them especially for profiling purposes. In the meantime, the EU commission started to work on a draft bill of the EU data protection regulation and browser providers started to change the default browser settings in an allegedly privacy-friendly way. Apple started to block third party cookies by default with Safari. Microsoft decided to set the privacy default settings in its Internet Explorer to “medium”.