March 17, 2015
Meinrath is director of X-Lab, a nonprofit that “anticipates the disruptions and dystopian outcomes of tech policy decisions and aims to help humanity change course.” He’s telling this story here at SXSW, the annual tech confab, whose attendees view large-scale, opaque data collection and surveillance as evil when practiced by government — but a totally legitimate business model when practiced by private companies. This audience is not terribly sympathetic to regulatory proposals to curb online data collection and behavioral targeting, or, as with the European Union’s “right to be forgotten,” allow users to expunge their online records altogether.