The Character of Consent

Biographical Note:
Meg Leta Jones is Provost's Distinguished Associate Professor in the Communication, Culture & Technology program at Georgetown University and the author of Ctrl+Z: The Right to Be Forgotten. She is also a core faculty member of the Science, Technology and International Affairs program in Georgetown's School of Foreign Service, a faculty affiliate with the Institute for Technology Law & Policy at Georgetown Law Center, and a faculty fellow at the Georgetown Ethics Lab.

Commendation Quotes:
"While the cookies at the center of Meg Leta Jones's book are not made of sugar, The Character of Consent is a sweet and delicious examination of the politics of data and privacy in our digital world."
--danah boyd, author of It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens

"Who knew that the humble cookie contains the crumbs of so many of our internet-age dilemmas? Discover here the compelling, necessary backstory of how we arrived at a digital present that we never truly consented to."
--Sarah E. Igo, author of The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America

"History matters. Meg Leta Jones shows us how in The Character of Consent, a clear and compelling transnational analysis of the evolving public policy debate over digital privacy."
--Richard R. John, author of Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications

Table of Contents:
Contents
CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: COOKIES AND CONSENTING CHARACTERS 3
CHAPTER 2: COMPUTING THE DATA SUBJECT 18
CHAPTER 3: NETWORKING THE USER 47
CHAPTER 4: MAINTAINING STATE FOR THE PRIVACY CONSUMER 65
CHAPTER 5: CONTESTING COOKIES FOR DATA PRIVACY 88
CHAPTER 6 CONCLUSION: THE (FORCED) RETIREMENT OF COOKIES 105

Publisher Marketing:
The rich, untold origin story of the ubiquitous web cookie--what's wrong with it, why it's being retired, and how we can do better.

Consent pop-ups continually ask us to download cookies to our computers, but is this all-too-familiar form of privacy protection effective? No, Meg Leta Jones explains in The Character of Consent, rather than promote functionality, privacy, and decentralization, cookie technology has instead made the internet invasive, limited, and clunky. Good thing, then, that the cookie is set for retirement in 2024. In this eye-opening book, Jones tells the little-known story of this broken consent arrangement, tracing it back to the major transnational conflicts around digital consent over the last twenty-five years. What she finds is that the policy controversy is not, in fact, an information crisis--it's an identity crisis.

Instead of asking how people consent, Jones asks who exactly is consenting and to what. Packed into those cookie pop-ups, she explains, are three distinct areas of law with three different characters who can consent. Within (mainly European) data protection law, the data subject consents. Within communication privacy law, the user consents. And within consumer protection law, the privacy consumer consents. These areas of law have very different histories, motivations, institutional structures, expertise, and strategies, so consent--and the characters who can consent--plays a unique role in those areas of law. The Character of Consent gives each computer character its due, taking us back to their origin stories within the legal history of computing. By doing so, Jones provides alternative ways of understanding the core issues within the consent dilemma. More importantly, she offers bold new approaches to creating and adopting better tech policies in the future.