Currently European citizens’ profiles being captured as hostage to circumvent privacy laws for social media. This has been going on for some time in an unspoken way, creating risky situations for the multinationals as they invade our privacy by tuning correlations between client profiles and behaviour. As we speak they are working out this loop hole that is left in our laws, where businesses are allowed to invade on our privacy, called ‘legitimate interest’. Meta is asking its users to comply with paying for using Facebook, either by a monthly fee, or forcing commercial breaks. Yet, we already were providing them with content, free of charge from our side, so they’ve created an imbalance. Their move to ask individual users to comply with their options is to avoid the risk of being sued.

Legitimate interest is the situation where entrepreneurs have some leeway developing revenue strategies in interaction with their clients when additional service is provided. It also gives them space to maneuver when new laws and rules increase entrepreneurial risk. This seems logical in case of ‘linear products’ like for instance plastic bottles, where environmental rules force the cap to remain attached to the bottle while used. It forces the producing party of bottles with a problem to solve, they couldn’t reasonably anticipate. Hence, their solution is ‘allowed to’ make our consumer experience less ‘optimal’.

Social media however, are something different, because of their impact and what it means to us.. They’ve grown from a situation where people were free to communicate amongst each other and correlate on mutual interest. Media creators jumped between them, first to make it more easy and probably enjoying themselves in the process while also creating a way to earn their keep by doing so. They’d created a source for exchanging interesting information, besides being a contacting medium. At some point it provided for some users to make money out of it too, because businesses took interest in them. This led to interface constructions supporting self promotion, like ‘likes’. For many users the number of likes per message became the reason to interact. A kind of gratification… and many such strategies followed suit, provided by developers.

Eventually these strategies led to interaction addiction… addiction to a (virtual) reality concept where, unlike the real world, there is little risk at being misunderstood or being harmed by these interactions. Needless to say that this will backfire on the real world, just because it is a systemic societal alternative, but I digress. The mondial addiction is now being monetised by this juridical vehicle called legitimate interest. One could view our interactions on the internet as an extended personal space. A space that should have some definition for personal ownership. Addiction or none, it shouldn’t give providers ownership of the communication between users, let alone a possible profile derived from it.

I can think of many specific problems with this, but one of them is the fact that these multinationals wrongly exploit our social dependencies that have often grown over decades. They do this without providing actual alternatives or a way out. They seem to give alternatives by providing a choice between paying them to avoid commercial activities, or keep using their medium for free, while being force fed on commercials. I was already ‘paying’ them by providing content, but now they are about to use my content echoing it (via AI), meanwhile bombarding me with third party consumer information. Them asking me for a monthly fee or forcing commercials on me is a kind of bullying me to comply. Thus, they are taking ownership over my communications and interaction profile, by taking it hostage for compliance.

I’d like to get out of this. Retreat. I want the content I have provided over the years to be retracted and them to provide means to be able to withdraw myself controllably. This, of course, is almost impossible for them to provide in, even if they were inclined to do so. Financially and practically. But I do think I should have the right. There should be European laws or rules, giving an individual power to go against legitimate interest in a way where one is not intrinsically violated for need of social societal structures. It should also be a prerequisite for service providers in general, to provide service without monetising on it, or at least provide a free alternative when it pertains to normal social interactions.

In case of the bottle cap… There are many ways to comply. If you look at the kinds of solutions they invented, there are some very impractical varieties. Especially in case of drink cartons. I’ve always disliked the addition of plastic caps to these cartons, where folding them open sufficed. They should provide in a variety without the cap again, giving consumers a choice. There have been some products never resorting to cartons with plastic cap and I favoured those already. I imagine there’s no turning back because people seldom do… I just hope there will be some kind of revolt on this excessive development in legitimate interest in case of service, especially for the sake of social and societal structures involved. I believe the argument of legitimate interest is illegal in these cases. There hasn’t been a situation where they were confronted with risk conditions they couldn’t reasonably anticipate, while operating within normal bounds. Legitimate interest is used as a tool. A tool to manipulate privacy issues and the services we need to use a product in the first place. Like I said… they monetise on our communication and the interactions themselves… manipulating dependencies and invading personal space. This is wrong, unjust and renders us slaves to their product.