In Big Data era the privacy by consent principle shall be replaced by privacy by accountability

In the ‘big data’ era the principle of ‘privacy by consent’ has become increasingly meaningless and should be replaced by ‘privacy by accountability’ including stricter means of holding companies accountable for how they use data (Mayer-Schönberger,. 

Mayer-Schönberger has argued that in the age of big data much of data’s value is in secondary uses that were not foreseen when the data was collected. Hence, data protection should place less emphasis on data collection and more on the subsequent uses of data. Data is no longer collected based on a specific purpose and an informed user consent, on the contrary, the purpose of collecting the data is frequently formulated in broad generic terms and accepted by the user with limited sense of what the consent implies. 

“The ability to capture personal data is often built deep into the tools we use every day, from Web sites to smartphone apps” (Ibid: xx). Coupled with the fact that personal data represents commercial value to an extent not previously seen, it makes no sense to rely on user content as the primary data protection mechanism, the argument goes.

 In consequence, Mayer-Schönberger suggests to focus on increased accountability for the companies that use data and to increase the power of data protection authorities as safeguards between the individual and data processing companies such as Facebook.