https://hitesh.in/tags/privacy/ Recent content in Privacy on Dr. Hitesh Sarda Hugo en-US Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://hitesh.in/2026/consent-theater/ Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://hitesh.in/2026/consent-theater/ <p>Roughly <a href="https://www.advance-metrics.com/en/blog/cookie-behaviour-study/">90% of people click &ldquo;accept&rdquo;</a> on a cookie banner when rejecting takes an extra click or two. Ask those same people whether they actually want to be tracked and <a href="https://killthecookiebanner.eu/">about 3%</a> say yes. That gap, between the click and the wish, is the most instructive number in technology policy right now, and almost nobody arguing about AI is looking at it.</p> <p>A cookie banner never measured consent. It measured how much friction a person will absorb before they surrender and hit the biggest button. Europe ran that experiment across its entire internet for over a decade, and the verdict is in: consent collected at the moment of maximum annoyance is worthless as a signal and expensive as a habit. We are now wiring the same machine into how AI gets governed, and the people making product and policy calls can still decline to build it.</p>