The average person today clicks “Accept All” at least a dozen times a day, whether it's cookie alerts, privacy agreements, or fifty-page terms-of-service updates. Whatever pops up, we click past it all.
Not because we fully understand what we’re agreeing to, but because refusing is much more painful. And refusal might mean we put up with an outdated operating system, be shut out of an app, or, more commonly, be cut off from the people and systems that are intrinsic to our daily lives. What I’m describing is not consent. It is forced compliance under duress, and it’s now what researchers call the “tech consent crisis.”
Consent has meaning. It means choice, awareness of what one is agreeing to, and the possibility of refusal. The parameters offered by Big Tech, as described by Meg Leta Jones, a professor of communication, culture, and technology at Georgetown University, fall short of at least a couple of fundamental principles of consent. These principles include specificity, awareness, freedom, and reversibility.
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Get notified of top trending articles like this one every week! (we won't spam you)Illusion of Choice
Think about the cookie consent page that pops up on our screens all the time. The pop-up offers us some choices, but declining it will most likely lead to a poor user experience. The same idea applies to mobile app permissions and operating system updates. If you reject them, your phone will automatically slow down, and features might stop working.
But the cost of not using these apps altogether is very high. For anyone under the age of 30, that means giving up group chats, class intel, party invitations, and workplace culture built solely around direct messages and relationships. Clicking “I agree” is not a real choice when refusing cuts off your access to work, communication, and daily life.
Consent, in this sense, is starting to feel like a trap. The social platforms we use know that they are not optional luxuries for us.
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Recorded Without Knowing It
The Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses and the upcoming Google x Warby Parker collab have raised new questions about third-party, non-consensual surveillance in public settings.
These gadgets are designed to be unobtrusive. A built-in LED flashes when recording is active, but few people would understand that signal, and even fewer would look for a blinking LED on other strangers’ faces. Those who are surveilled, scanned, and possibly recorded are not the owners of the gadgets—they are simply subjects in the background.
The threat does not come only from the intentional abuse of the technology—for example, covert filming. The bigger problem is that being watched becomes normal. Just by being visible in public, you get read and recorded by machines you never agreed to be monitored by.
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Surveillance Repackaged as Convenience
The best way tech companies normalize surveillance is to make the process frictionless and beneficial. For instance, we use Face ID because it’s faster than typing a passcode. We like geotagging because it helps us remember where we took that picture. For most of us who live with these technologies, we haven’t had a chance to consider life any other way.
The Executive Director of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law, Emily Tucker, argues that disclosure alone does not necessarily limit power, and can sometimes normalize it. When a technology is acknowledged but not meaningfully restricted, its use becomes easier to accept. Over time, surveillance stops feeling like something that requires justification.
This dynamic is especially important to our generation. The question of what life before surveillance felt like is not rhetorical but really cannot be answered. Tucker makes a similar point, saying she has no sense of what a less monitored world would look like, since constant monitoring has always felt like a default part of her surroundings rather than a choice.
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What Should Change?
The solution isn’t more explicit cookie banners. Big Tech continues to encroach on our freedom and privacy, and the issue is architectural, not cosmetic. What we really need is public governance, an agreement as to how these technologies should be used, what they should track, and whether they should be deployed at all.
This means regulatory action should extend beyond disclosure requirements. It also means social media and AI companies should be held accountable under laws based on transparency, not just by changes to their terms of service. It also means regulators need to recognize ambient data capture (sensors and AI automatically pick up information about you in the background) for what it is, not some type of tech innovation, a story the tech industry prefers. And our generation should demand more transparency than an updated text when checking accept all.
Our generation was never consulted about the infrastructure that would spy on us from birth. Yet we have the most on the line, which means we have the greatest potential to influence change. The first step is to stop framing compliance as consent.
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