look is the oil that fuels the digital economy.
Zuckerberg is certainly right about one thing: Apple is using its dominant position in the mobile phone market to unilaterally impose a major change to how user data is tracked and shared online. Establishing an “opt in” regime, in which privacy is the default and users have to give affirmative consent to share their data, has long been a dream of privacy activists. Few people are willing to take the trouble of opting out of every individual site or app they use, let alone the ones they don’t know are tracking them. Opt-in is considered so politically and even legally difficult to achieve, however, that even California’s newly enacted privacy law, the most ambitious in the nation, doesn’t go that far. And yet Apple, a private company, can flip a switch and achieve what no US government regulator has—at least when it comes to the roughly half of the US mobile market that it controls. (Internationally, Google’s Android operating system is much more prevalent.)