You must not have noticed, but this week, we celebrated the National Data Privacy Day. A holiday declared by Congress in 2009, it aspires to promote people’s control over their personal information. It is a day for us to reflect on how much information we share online, how safe it is, and an opportunity to “create dialogues among stakeholders interested in advancing data protection and privacy.”

Anxiety over online data privacy helped produce not just a national holiday with its highfaluting “dialogues” and “be privacy aware” clichés. Data privacy anxiety is also manifesting itself in host of legal initiatives aimed primarily at improving the notices and disclosures that consumers receive, in the hope that better “transparency” would produce informed choice and individual control.

Recently, this anxiety was directed vis-à-vis Google, alleging that it misleadingly changed its privacy policy to collect more information for its tailored ads. Google’s updated legal notice explained (correctly) to its users that they now have more choice to opt out of ads-personalization. But in the same breath—and in small print—Google also increased the amount of data it compiles on users, creating more individualized profiles and curating more relevant (and more effective) ads. The FTC and the European Union are investigating whether consumers’ consent was acquired deceptively, without giving users clear notices.

Read more at Forbes