Consent Firewall for the Agent Economy: Data Rights That Survive Delegation

The strongest objection is that a consent firewall can become consent fatigue with better branding. People may click through receipts they do not understand. Predatory apps may ask for broad authority in polished language. Dashboards may become another burden. A bad standard may give companies legal cover to say the user "consented" while the system still steers them toward extraction.

That objection should shape the rule. The firewall cannot rely on more prompts alone. It needs defaults, banned dark patterns, least privilege, short expiration, separate approval for sensitive reuse, liability for scope violations, public conformance tests, human fallback, and enforcement against deceptive design. The point is not to make users read more. It is to make systems ask for less, retain less, share less, and prove what they did.

Agent providers, covered services, agencies, data holders, standards bodies, regulators, and auditors bear the direct implementation cost. They must build scoped authorization, receipts, revocation endpoints, dashboards, logs, incident reporting, retention controls, support channels, accessibility, and conformance testing. Some incumbent data brokers, screen-scraping firms, dark-pattern subscription models, and vendors built around opaque access may lose revenue or leverage.

The public bears cost if the rule is badly designed. People could face too many prompts, confusing dashboards, broken revocation, false reassurance, or exclusion from services that push everyone into digital delegation. Small firms and civic developers could face compliance burdens if standards are proprietary or unstable. The issue accepts the implementation cost because the alternative is worse: broad agent access without durable consent turns private life into a set of one-way data flows that people cannot see, stop, or challenge.