Activists and tech companies are deadlocked in a dispute about proposed privacy protection schemes that would be woefully inadequate.

They would be a more codified form of today's "privacy policies", which are hardly worth paying attention to.

Once data are collected, they will be misused — by rogue staff, by criminal crackers (please don't call them "hackers"), and by the US and other governments, and probably by the company too, because its "privacy policy" allows harmful use.

What we need is to stop systems from collecting the data.