users will not want to see data mining expanding across their WhatsApp metadata. But if that’s the price to maintain encryption, one can assume it will be a relatively easy sell for most users.

Google encouraging site admins to put reCaptcha all over their sites, and then sharing the resulting risk scores with those admins is great for security, Perona thinks, because he says it “gives site owners more control and visibility over what’s going on” with potential scammer and bot attacks, and the system will give admins more accurate scores than if reCaptcha is only using data from a single webpage to analyze user behavior. But there’s the trade-off. “It makes sense and makes it more user-friendly, but it also gives Google more data,”

For instance, Google’s reCaptcha cookie follows the same logic of the Facebook “like” button when it’s embedded in other websites—it gives that site some social media functionality, but it also lets Facebook know that you’re there.

Earlier this year it began asking Europeans for consent to processing their selfies for facial recognition purposes — a highly controversial technology that regulatory intervention in the region had previously blocked. Yet now, as a consequence of Facebook’s confidence in crafting manipulative consent flows, it’s essentially figured out a way to circumvent EU citizens’ fundamental rights — by socially engineering Europeans to override their own best interests.

The deceitful obfuscation of commercial intention certainly runs all the way through the data brokering and ad tech industries that sit behind much of the ‘free’ consumer Internet. Here consumers have plainly been kept in the dark so they cannot see and object to how their personal information is being handed around, sliced and diced, and used to try to manipulate them.

design choices are being selected to be intentionally deceptive. To nudge the user to give up more than they realize. Or to agree to things they probably wouldn’t if they genuinely understood the decisions they were being pushed to make.

For mainly two reasons: I pay for things that bring value to my life, and when something's "free", you're usually really just giving away your privacy without being aware.

Google Recaptcha and personal dataBut we all know: there’s no such thing as a free lunch right? So what is the price we pay for this great feature? Right: it’s personal data.