Consent was adopted as the organising principle of data protection because it fitted an existing legal vocabulary, not because anyone had established that it could bear the weight. Its conditions are demanding: the person consenting must understand what is being collected, to what use it will be put, and by whom, at the moment of agreeing. Contemporary data practice defeats each of these in turn, since the uses are determined later by inference, the recipients are numerous and unnamed, and the consequences depend on combination with information the person has never seen. What remains is a ritual that transfers liability rather than a decision that protects anyone. The persistence of the framework is explained less by its effectiveness than by the absence of an alternative that could be written into a form and clicked.