The internet is usually understood as an open billboard system, somewhat akin to what you find in a town square
Anybody can put up a website for anyone to see/visit
People consider them to be anonymous if they don't mention their name
They use pseudonims, alliases, pgp
Sites install cookies to track visits of users, retain data and pretend that was all shared in the common domain
The nature of the internet is entrely different
The internet is better understood as a direct mail service, a letter to be mailed to you waits until you request it to be send.
When you visit a website you basicaly have send your adress to a driect mail service, that instantly send you a letter with the content of the site. The sender knows where it send the letter.
You can fill in data on the digital form you recieved in the letter and send it back. This to is a highly targeted exchange.
The internet could work through the postal service in exacly this way. It would be a stream of SD cards in envelopes between specific adresses.
These adresses are IP adresses, and they are assigned to people or companies, just like real adresses. Moste can be easily resolved.
The issue is that if I send a message to a site with data ( I fil in a form), that message is my private message to the site. It is very easy to argue that this is subject to the privacy and non violation laws covering postal messages.
If I send data to a site to be availabe for sending to friends f.i. on Facebook, then the site itself was never implied as a recipient of the envelopes. Nowehre it says 'and I share this data with Mark Zukerberg as well'. How many friends does he have on fb?
If I send a message to Google that I would like to recieve a list of sites with a certain search critirium, and the site returns with a message of that list. Should it be allowed to record that message for analysis and use by third parties? Would you be creeped out if you went to the lirary and someone was noting down what terms you looked up in the index?
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