The Consent Paradox: How EU Regulations Enabled Corporate Data Harvesting
The European Union's cookie consent rules & guidelines, designed to protect user privacy, have paradoxically created a sophisticated surveillance infrastructure controlled by eight to ten Consent Management Platform companies. This legal essay examines how GDPR compliance requirements enabled corporate data harvesting on an unprecedented scale, with academic studies showing 85% of consent interfaces violate basic privacy requirements while websites using professional consent systems deploy 6.9 times more tracking technologies than those with basic implementations. Rather than protecting European citizens from surveillance capitalism, these regulations have institutionalized "consent theater" that legitimizes expanded data collection under the guise of user choice.
