Take Control of Your Privacy with Global Privacy Control
The challenge of protecting the privacy of people online while still providing free services and content, is a challenge that has been met with many attempted solutions. Unfortunately nothing has really worked well to date but the pressures of privacy legislation like GDPR, (Europe) LGPD (Brazil) and CCPA (California) are pushing technologists to figure out how to have each individual communicate their privacy desires to the websites that they visit.
The latest attempt in solving this problem is the Global Privacy Control (GPC) signal from the Global Privacy Organization. Their website states, “You might have noticed ‘Do Not Sell’ and ‘Object To Processing’ links around the web from companies complying with privacy regulations. Rather than having to click on each of these links individually across many websites, you can exercise your rights in one step via the ‘Global Privacy Control’ (GPC) signal, which is required under the California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA) and Europe’s Global Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).”
The concept is pretty simple. You and I, as consumers on the Internet, download a supporting browser extension and turn on GPC. Once the settings are in place, the browser would send those preferences to each website that we visit so the website knows, and can comply with our privacy rights and wishes.
image from globalprivacycontrol.org
GPC was started by Ashkan Soltani (Georgetown Law) and Sebastian Zimmeck (Wesleyan University) and is now supported by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Financial Times, Automattic (WordPress.com & Tumblr), Glitch, DuckDuckGo, Brave, Mozilla, Disconnect, Abine, Digital Content Next (DCN), Consumer Reports, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The current list of supporters can be found on the GPC website..
While it’s in the early phases, users can download a browser extension or supported browser to be an early adopter and try it out for themselves.
For more information about the project, visit the Global Privacy Control website and read the GPC Press Release from October 7, 2020.
