Eliminating Cookie Click-Thrus: A Strategy for Enhancing Digital Privacy
Summary
Everyone hates cookie notifications, click-thrus, and pop-ups. While cookies give the web more functionality, their excessive use and attendant consent system can interfere with user experience and raises serious privacy concerns. The next administration should commit to finally resolving these and related issues by creating a digital privacy task force within the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). The task force would coordinate relevant agencies—including the Federal Trade Commission, Federal Communications Commission, and Department of Commerce—in working with Congress, state actors, and European Union partners to develop meaningful data-privacy protections.
By structuring licensing-and-talent deals that replicate mergers while avoiding antitrust scrutiny, dominant technology firms are reshaping AI labor markets, venture financing, and the future of U.S. innovation.
It is in the interests of the United States to appropriately protect information that needs to be protected while maintaining our participation in new discoveries to maintain our competitive advantage.
Our analysis of federal AI governance across administrations shows that divergent compliance procedures and uneven institutional capacity challenge the government’s ability to deploy AI in ways that uphold public trust.
To secure the U.S. bio-infrastructure, maintain global leadership in biotechnology, and safeguard American citizens from emerging threats to their privacy, the federal government must modernize its approach to human genetic and biological data.