There is only one form of valid user consent;

INFORMED, ENTHUSIASTIC CONSENT, REVOCABLE.

That's it. No ifs, no buts.

The user must understand what they are giving consent for, and the scope for which their consent is valid.

They must enthusiastic, wholly onboard with the decision, not begrudgingly agreeing to it because they feel like they have no other choice.

And they must be able to revoke that consent at any time, whether five minutes from now, or five years in the future.

Their consent should be time-limited, and expire automatically when they no longer interact with your service or product.

If you change the scope, you need to ask for their consent again, and make sure they understand the impact of the changes you are making.

The scope includes who owns and operates the service or product. If you want to be acquired, you need to ask for their consent again.

User consent is NOT transferrable, period, no matter what modern terms of service claim.

Most people in tech do not want to hear this, because it invalidates the vast majority of their business models, AI/ML training data, business intel operations, and so forth. Anything that's based on gathering data that is 'public' suddenly becomes suspect, if the above is applied.

And yes, that includes internet darlings like the Internet Archive, which also operates on a non-consensual, opt-out model.

It's the Western Acquisition, claiming ownership without permission.

It's so ingrained in white, Western internet culture that there are now whole generations who consider anything that can be read by the crawler they wrote in a weekend to be fair game, regardless or what the user's original intent was.

Republishing, reformatting, archiving, aggregating, all without the user being fully aware, because if they were, they would object.

It's dishonest as fuck, and no different from colonial attitudes towards natural resource.

"It's there, so we can take it." 😒