The initiative must, at a minimum:
- Embrace holistic privacy, starting with a comprehensive consensus-building process to understand users’ diverse privacy expectations and the complex realities of data (mis)use in the modern web ecosystem.
- Adopt (and justify) a flexible, dynamic definition of privacy based on philosophical norms and threat modeling of real user harms (including those perpetrated by “first parties” like Google itself).
- Be ready and empowered to adjudicate conflicting interests, and create enforceable and pragmatic data use rules.
- Acknowledge real-world trade-offs between privacy, functionality and competitive market structure.
- Focus on incremental progress rather than utopian reinvention of the entire digital world.
It’s time to move beyond simplistic privacy dogmatism. It’s time to embrace and nurture the complex, chaotic beauty of the modern internet. And it’s time to develop an international privacy regime that serves and respects users while allowing for innovation and sustainable, “don’t be evil” business models.
This won’t be cheap, easy or fun. But it’s the only way to build a truly privacy-respecting web that works for everyone, not just trillion-dollar giants.