The Usability-Privacy Tradeoff is Manufactured & Driving Bad Laws

The new Digital Omnibus Package is set to be released November 19th 2025 significantly eroding the privacy protections of GDPR. Privacy regulations like GDPR heralded a vital shift in individual privacy. These laws demanded clear, unambiguous consent for specific data processing, effectively putting consumers in the driver’s seat — an unmitigated win for individual rights.

Unfortunately, the digital advertising industry converted this new right into a usability tax by interrupting users everywhere they went. "How else," they argued, "could we possibly capture consent?" This response manufactured a false dilemma: a usability vs. privacy tradeoff. Industry immediately flung the burden right back onto the consumer. Users were told they could have privacy control, but only if they agreed to be frustrated by complex, intrusive consent banners on every single site they visited. 

Should consumers have to surrender their privacy rights to avoid interruption? Should publishers be forced to give up their means of monetization? Why are these the only two options? 

The problem has never been technical; rather it was a failure of imagination. What the ad ecosystem needed was a solution that offloaded the time and burden required to exercise these rights, allowing choices to be made seamlessly or only at a time when users actually wanted to engage. While targeted ads do provide value to consumers, that value is not sufficient for many to give up their privacy. To create incentive alignment, sites must give consumers something more — they need to be made whole for enabling the use of their data.

Unfortunately, instead of innovating, the EU is now considering significant carveouts to GDPR, narrowing the definition of personal data and even removing the requirement for media sites to adhere to consent signals. Limiting consumer rights and creating broad exemptions is the wrong path forward. Why punish the user for the industry’s failure to innovate?

Solutions like Rewarded Interest prove that it is possible to provide consumers full privacy control without getting in their way. By shifting the consent process to an asynchronous, browser-based control, users get to define what data uses they allow (or disallow) for the sites they visit without interruption. Through the ability to set global defaults, consumers can seamlessly access content without giving up their rights.

Gutting GDPR doesn’t help anyone. Better solutions exist. But, for such solutions like Rewarded Interest to work, sites must still respect privacy signals, so that consumers can maintain control over their personal data — even if that data is anonymized. The good news is alternate solutions exist that break through the usability-privacy tradeoff. It’s not too late to give consumers both.