I had been eager to offer a keynote address at the Data for Health (#DFH23) conference in Berlin. Shifting schedules transformed my participation into a panel. It was a long trip for a short talk, so best to make it explosive.
Peter Drucker once said, “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” That’s the idea I’d like to add to this conversation, playing the role of skunk at the garden party.
Because my view is that privacy law made a fundamental mistake at its start — at least its start in the digital era. At the core of that regulation is the concept of individual consent. That choice — the choice of that regulatory architecture — was a fundamental mistake. The consequence of that mistake is — literally — the deaths of uncountable individuals who would have been saved by more effective and informed medical treatment.
Let me state the point as starkly as I can: We are sacrificing real lives to benefit a vague and ultimately meaningless ideal of individual consent.
That claim, of course, is the claim of utilitarians generally, when arguing against individual rights that conflict with the general…
