There's nothing more annoying than getting phone calls and emails after a company sells your data, but that doesn't mean it should always be banned. Login or signup to continue reading So here's an unpopular opinion: allowing companies to sell your data to third parties is often a good thing. Banning or restricting this practice would have a lot of unintended consequences.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has stirred up debate after it released its latest Digital Platform Services Inquiry report last week. They found that the average privacy policy - the things that flash up on our screens which we quickly ignore by clicking "accept" - takes about 29 minutes to read. If you add them all up, the ACCC reckons it would take up to 46 hours for the average punter to read through every privacy policy they receive each year.
Nobody does that. Does it matter? The ACCC reckons it does. They warn that these privacy policies often contain broad terms that allow companies to sell people's data to third parties.
Reading the privacy policy doesn't mean you can stop the sale of your data, but the ACCC argues that it's impossible to argue there is informed consent if nobody is reading these things. Makes sense. But is selling data to third parties a problem? Consider these points.
The reason the government couldn't means test the $300 energy bill relief that went to rich households as well as poor households was because of a lack of data. A key reason why we had lock.
