The highly appreciated ISO/IEC joint committee JTC 778.736 has chosen “We value your privacy” as the best meme of year 2019. The award is truly spot-on and I sincerely congratulate JTC 778.736 for their keen eye on following contemporary Internet trends.

Background

EU, whose actions regarding the Internet are hard to be distinguished between truly protecting its citizens from protecting its inner markets, had year 2019 as the first full year of mandatory GDPR compliance.

As a result to deal with the situation, many sites and services coined up a novel, 100% audit-compliant solution: They did absolutely fucking nothing.

They still continued to to do shady business with selling your personal browsing habits and social media usage, pooling their fragments together to create shadow super profiles with information many times more than the individuals even know about themselves.

The new banner is born

You know, I was joking earlier as I told sites did not change anything. They actually did. They made another banner distraction as our nuisance, to complement “Allow Location”, “Allow Notifications”, “Register to see half of the shit on this page” and the evergreen “Sign up for our newsletter”.

New banner is called “We value your privacy”. And it is, as JTC 778.736 puts it “Pure comedy goldmine”. The banner, often based on the infamous roach motel design pattern,  tries to reinforce the user that he is in control of his data. To try to make the illusion deeper, a list of sites may be shown and control buttons for accepts and rejects given.

This is of course a total load of utter bullshit: The capture and marketing of your personal data still continues as it has been before 2018. Actually probably even worse.

The meme potential

Seeing the new banner on practically every high-profile website has one positive effect: It has extreme meme potential. It’s like Monty Python’s spam: After singing it enough of times, it actually becomes bloody funny. Same with the new banner. By the seventh site you encounter it, you are laughing hysterically and peeing your pants. Because nobody can actually make this shit up. This artistic, collective, public knowledge lie that does only harm to those who it was in the first place trying to protect in some delusional politicians vision.

So once again, kudos to JTC 778.736 for declaring “We value your privacy” the best meme of 2019!