Article Excerpt:

In January, I wrote a piece about the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a European provision aimed at giving users more control over the data they share online. Quick recap: The European Union will institute many new rules to protect user data, including the oft-cited “right to be forgotten.”

The premise of my earlier article was that the GDPR might be a sort of canary in the proverbial coal mine. Seeing how the rest of the world reacted to the regulations would be a solid chance to gauge how much power governments would have to shape privacy in the online domain. These sort of privacy concerns go to the heart of many intellectual freedom issues, particularly where anonymity is required for research and online interaction.