Dehaye is an activist, and his aim is not only to access data but also to document the arduousness and even absurdity of the undertaking. Given these realities, he suggests that the data-protection regulations are comparable to freedom-of-information laws. The procedures for requesting and receiving information under these laws are imperfect and onerous, typically undertaken by legal specialists, but nevertheless essential to democratic freedom. Although effective contest will require determined individuals, the individual alone cannot shoulder the burden of justice, any more than an individual worker in the first years of the twentieth century could bear the burden of fighting for fair wages and working conditions. Those twentieth-century challenges required collective action, and so do our own.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1548