President Joe Biden wrote an Wall Street Journal op-ed on January 11, 2023 calling for “serious federal protections for Americans’ privacy.” Digital Content Next CEO Jason Kint tweeted out that “I’ll sit down with anyone to explain why privacy integrated with antitrust is the critical issue of our time” and I took him up on his offer. Kint serves as a sort of industry watchdog for surveillance capitalism companies like Google and Facebook/Meta digging through anti-trust court transcripts, depositions, and other buried legal obscurities as he keeps close tabs on the relationship between the dominant players of advertising and their associated data practices.

I wanted to get some of Kint’s takes on the latest privacy frontiers of US law at the federal and state level, some of the recent $400M GDPR enforcement actions against Meta by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, and why he’s keeping so close tabs on the anti-trust and the potential anti-competitive practices of Google and Facebook/Meta’s ad businesses. Digital Content Next is a trade organization that represents the future News and Entertainment companies who are advancing the future of trusted content. He has been tracking how the advertising ecosystem has been steadily growing over many years, but mostly to the benefits Google and Facebook/Meta, which he identified was connected to their surveillance capitalism data collection methods that has been providing deep challenges to the fundamental nature of consumer privacy.