Counting the cost of digital privacy

If your online business model depends on your customers not understanding what you’re doing, is it a sustainable and ethical business, and does it deserve to survive?

Antoin O Lachtnain, a director of Digital Rights Ireland: ‘People don’t really understand that the things they look at in a web browser, the places they go and the people they talk to, are all monitored.‘ Photo: Bryan Meade

To what degree are you comfortable with information about you being bought and sold? That’s the question facing social media users as the issue of online privacy takes a new twist in 2021.

Changes are on the way to how people’s online habits are monitored, and they threaten to have a major impact on some of the most profitable companies in the world.

Last year, Apple announced it would make a significant change to an ...