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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.

**Digital Privacy Laws Face a Borderless Data Economy**

Digital privacy laws promise users greater control of their data online but implementing and exercising these rights when data is spread across apps, advertisers, data brokers and governments is far from simple.

Many countries including the EU and California have set out in laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation and the California Consumer Privacy Act what information companies have to disclose to consumers about their data practices and what rights consumers have over their personal information, such as the right to access, correction, deletion etc.

Current data protection regimes differ as to the extent to which users have the right to have their data removed from different services. In most cases deleting data from one service does not lead to all copies of that data being deleted by third parties.

But other factors also mitigate the impact of the consent granted in private and in public contexts, such as the lengthy notice of the terms of use of a service online, which are not always easy to compare with each other, and the various interests that can drive a person to access online a service which he/she/it needs for work, school or for many reasons of daily life.

Additionally, it is challenging for governments to monitor rapidly evolving systems, in many cases spread over the world. Because companies with large legal and compliance departments have a heavy burden placed on them, smaller companies are at a disadvantage. By the time severe action is taken by authorities, data has already been collected and shared, and been compromised.

New technologies are constantly being developed to process data about individuals. For example, the increasing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to analyze datasets comprising apparently innocuous information, raised fresh concerns regarding the processing of personal data. Meanwhile, data brokers who process thousands of datasets comprising a myriad of information about individuals may be unknown to the data subject and the scope of personal information held is not easily determinable.

But all the rights and restrictions on the use of information now pledged to respect individuals’ privacy are of little use when the basic conditions for their effective exercise are not met, especially when information can multiply without bounds when digitized and spread among various services in the form of default settings designed to extract information in greatest quantity and of widest variety.

The main debates today revolve around whether more emphasis should be put on placing more obligations on organizations to limit and protect data, as opposed to relying on individual rights and the need for consent in advance of the use of personal information.

Digital privacy laws – even at their best – are a frail defence against information that travels far and fast, multiplying to disclose secrets that the donor never intended to be revealed.