I’ve referred to this bargain, in which people get content and services for free in exchange for having persuasive messages psychographically targeted to them, as the “original sin” of the internet. It’s a dangerous and socially corrosive business model that puts internet users under constant surveillance and continually pulls our attention from the tasks we want to do online towards the people paying to hijack our attention. It’s a terrible model that survives only because we haven’t found another way to reliably support most internet content and services—including getting individuals to pay for the things they claim to value…

Users of the internet have been forced into a bargain they had no hand in negotiating: You get the services you want, and platforms get the data they need. We need the right to opt out of this bargain, paying for services like Facebook or YouTube in exchange for verifiable assurances that our usage isn’t being tracked and that our behavioral data is not being sold. We need an ecosystem that encourages competitors to existing social-media platforms, which means ensuring a right to export data from existing social networks and new software that lets us experiment with new services while maintaining contacts on existing ones. We need to treat personally identifiable information less like a resource to be exploited and more like toxic waste, which must be carefully managed, as Maciej Ceglowski has proposed. This may require a digital EPA, as Franklin Foer, Paul Ford, and others have argued—a prospect that would be more appealing if the actual EPA wasn’t currently being gutted.