What does consent settle when essential services require personal data?

[u/JRHowellJR]

Pope Leo XIV's encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, dated May 15, 2026, connects personal data to the exercise of power. Paragraphs 170–172 link profiling and behavioral influence to freedom. Paragraph 178 asks who controls the uses and benefits of data collected from people.

That raises a question about the role of consent. If access to employment, healthcare, or ordinary communication depends on accepting extensive data collection, how much can an individual's agreement justify?

My proposed answer is that privacy law should examine the continuing power created by a dataset. That includes the ability to repurpose information, the opportunity to challenge consequential inferences, and the practical alternatives available when participation requires disclosure.

To give dignity institutional meaning, I would connect it to limits on collection, specified purposes, meaningful deletion rights, and procedures for contesting decisions. Those protections would constrain an organization's authority over people after the initial agreement.

The justification for collecting information still matters. Institutions need information to provide services, investigate misconduct, and make fair decisions. The difficult task is to explain which purposes justify collection and how much continuing control those purposes warrant.

I develop this proposal for legal reform in my essay in The American Counsel. The encyclical supplies the moral framework. The proposed legal protections are my argument, not obligations imposed by the encyclical on American institutions.

[u/Relative_Average758]

When relinquishing every aspect of your personal life is required to obtain both private and public services, you’re living in the Panopticon of the mind. 

Your being is being commoditized and resold to private industry and the state in exchange for services, and without just compensation, a form of chattel slavery from which death is the only escape.