Online search engines, social media platforms, and targeted advertising services often employ a “data-driven” business model based on the large-scale collection, analysis, and monetization of personal data. When providing such services significant information asymmetries arise: data-driven companies collect much more personal data than the consumer knows or can reasonably oversee, and data-driven companies have much more (technical) information about how this data is processed than consumers would be able to understand. This article demonstrates the vulnerable position consumers continue to find themselves in as a result of information asymmetries between them and data-driven companies. The GDPR, by itself, is in practice unable to mitigate these information asymmetries, nor would it be able to provide for effective transparency, since it does not account for the unique characteristics of the data-driven business model. Consumers are thus faced with an insurmountable lack of transparency which is inherent in, as well as the inevitable consequence of, the magnitude of the information asymmetries present on the data-driven market.

在线搜索引擎，社交媒体平台和有针对性的广告服务通常基于大规模收集，分析和货币化个人数据而采用“数据驱动”业务模型。提供此类服务时，会出现严重的信息不对称现象：数据驱动型公司收集的个人数据超出了消费者知道或可以合理监督的数量，并且数据驱动型公司所拥有的关于如何处理该数据的（技术）信息要比消费者能获得的更多了解。本文表明，由于消费者与数据驱动型企业之间的信息不对称，消费者继续处于弱势地位。GDPR本身实际上无法减轻这些信息不对称性，也无法提供有效的透明度，因为它不能说明数据驱动业务模型的独特特征。因此，消费者面临着无法克服的缺乏透明度的问题，这是数据驱动市场上存在的信息不对称程度固有的必然结果。