We have built our data protection laws on the edifice of consent. As a result, they are based on constructs that are derived from contractual frameworks. While this may have been acceptable in the early days of privacy law, the harms they need to protect against today are perhaps more effectively dealt with under tort law. We need to re-think consent. This is a link-enhanced and slightly edited version of an article that first appeared in The Mint. You can read the original here. Economists a...