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Digital privacy laws can make personal information safer, but as data is shared between applications, advertisers, brokers, and governments, these protections might not always be clear, easily enforced, or easy to exercise.

Recent legislation like the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation and California’s privacy laws provide a degree of access and control over personal information, but depending on where a person lives and works, protections can be inconsistent, broad, or entirely absent.

Users of technology might face different rules from one service to the next and encounter varying levels of access to — or ability to remove — one’s information.

Even when permission is necessary to use or share data, complicated language in privacy notices could make it hard to compare how information might be treated across companies, and a person might not have a practical alternative to agreeing if a service is needed to do one’s work or education.

Meanwhile, law enforcement must navigate complicated technical issues and inconsistent rules when enforcing privacy laws, and the penalties for misusing information might well be easier for larger organizations to absorb than smaller ones.

And with new technologies, there are growing concerns about how much inference made by artificial intelligence on data that seem innocuous in one context might become when combined with other data or presented out of context, and how much data aggregation occurs without people knowing which companies possess which information, beyond the protections offered by privacy laws.

That is not to minimize the effect such laws have in providing access to information, limiting what companies can collect by design, and imposing penalties when rules are deliberately circumvented.

But when it comes to personal information, legal rights to access and control are not the same as being able to exercise them, particularly when it comes to technology that offers little or no option but to share information freely in exchange for services.

The growing focus of privacy laws is likely to turn to placing more responsibility on organizations to limit collections, protect what is necessary, and justify how information is used, rather than asking individuals to make choices about something as fundamental as location data, purchasing habits, or web browsing.

For digital privacy laws, there is likely to be a long period of adjustment as laws clarify, companies adapt, and the rules around sharing information change dramatically, but the right to legal privacy is likely to remain a fundamental limitation on how much information technology companies can collect.

Digital Privacy Law is up against an economy of information that is borderless.

Digital privacy laws will give people greater access to their own information. However, while those data are in transit between apps, advertisers, brokers, and governments, those protections can be opaque, challenging to adhere to, and hard to assert.

The European Union's GDPR and California privacy laws mandate certain rules for companies: It must tell people what it does with their data and provides some rights to access or delete. The extent to which they can reach depends on geographic location, the custodian of the data and exceptions.

Due to this patchwork, users can have varying levels of protection for comparable activities. One company may be able to wipe out a profile, another organization might be able to hold onto related records for legal, security or business reasons. Nor does deletion from one service de facto mean deletion from its partners' services.

A consent can be another restriction. A privacy notice might outline the ways in which information is being used, it can be lengthy, and sometimes hard to compare. However, often times, people require one and it may be a matter of work, school or daily life, so the act of “agreeing” is less of a meaningful gesture than it sounds. Even if a company observes the current rules about disclosure, consumers may not understand what information can be gleaned from their location, buying patterns or browsing history.

They are difficult to enforce, too. Governments and other authorities have to keep abreast of evolving technical systems, sometimes even crossing national boundaries. For many larger companies, legal advice might be available and budgets made for compliance, but penalties tend to come long after the data has been gathered and/or released.

Introduction of new technologies puts pressure on. In essence, AI systems have the ability to make sense of seemingly innocuous sets of data. Data brokers are also potentially able to consolidate information from several sources making it difficult for individuals to determine who are holding information about them. There are also exemptions for some privacy laws, for government activity or sectors that have their own law.

However, that does not mean that privacy law doesn't work. If access rights, restrictions on data gathering and punishments for misuse are altered, this can help influence corporate conduct and provide regulators with the tools to intervene. However, if the products are created to collect a lot of information by default, then legal rights cannot guarantee privacy.

There is growing focus on reducing reliance on individual consent and imposing greater responsibility on organisations to keep collection to a minimum, to protect data, and explain how data is used. Righter rules, better supervision and privacy-friendly design might help to bridge the chasm between people's rights in theory and their control in practice.

At least for the time being, privacy law applies to digital communications as well, and it has some fundamental limitations: information that is given can be moved, copied and made available to others in ways that are unexpected by the giver.