I think that the right to privacy, at it's core, is really a right to consent. That is, individuals decide whether or not consent to divulging personal information to another party. That could range from storing someone's fingerprints, to tracking the websites they visit across the Web to opening up their mail and reading the contents of the envelope.

The issue is in how that consent is obtained.

So, today, the Internet has become the primary medium for most transactions. Whether it's booking a flight, ordering food, buying books, making a restaurant reservation, reading the news or applying for jobs. The biggest societal change of the past 20 year is the reliance of our daily life on the Internet. If you don't have access to the Internet today, you are at a huge disadvantage.

The big problem is that with any of those cases I just mentioned, you are required to access on line services and, in doing so, implicitly consent to the fact that your visit will be tracked and analysed by (a) the operator of the website or platform (e.g. American Airlines) and (b) any third parties that track you through embed codes.

Moreover, you don't know in advance whether or not you will be tracked until you open up the website and be confronted with a YouTube embed and a set of AddThis buttons, at which point it's already too late to retract your consent.

This is the very reason why the EU has issued the GDPR regulation forcing website operators to explicitly ask consent from visitors on their own behalf, and the behalf of third parties tracking through embedded widgets.

One downside of the GDPR is that end user is confronted with a pop-up before they get to the actual content.

Another downside is that some website operators tend to make consenting explicitly obtrusive unless you, as a visitor, hit the big green, flashy "Accept All" button that brings you directly to the content. Which is anything but what the GDPR envisioned.

A final downside is that the GDPR is difficult to enforce. As one is required to file a formal complaint if one feels that their rights aren't respected by website operators, which is generally not something most individual consumers are willing to spend time, money or effort on.

Even so, despite these downsides I feel that the GDPR is a step in the right direction, as it forces website operators to think about consent.

Consent to divulging personal information is only one part of the equation. I think the other part, the really problematic part, are the ends to which personal data are harvested and in whose hands that data ends up. While I agree with the statement that tracking in itself isn't evil per se, I think that scandals such as Cambridge Analytica, and how harvested data is used by advertisers to accurately target consumers, well, that is completely problematic. I think that far more regulation and, above all, enforcement of that regulation, is needed in this area.

Context very much matters. Personally, I don't mind being tracked across several e-commerce shops to provide me with relevant offers. I do mind being tracked on websites that absolutely have nothing to do with e-commerce, only to notice how that information ends up being used/abused in totally unrelated and, frankly, unwanted/undesirable contexts.