GDPR: Don't Panic

https://jacquesmattheij.com/gdpr-hysteria

by grabeh • 8 years ago

863 736 8 years ago

maxk42• 8 years ago

How does this affect people who aren't based in Europe?

halflings• 8 years ago

I think many (most?) companies will implement these privacy policies across all of their users as it can be hard to determine whether a user is in the EU or not... so indirectly, this law might mean that everybody will finally have strong privacy guarantees (at least when it comes to companies of a meaningful size).

tlamponi• 8 years ago

And as so often the EU will be the initiator of a world wide adoption of (semi) unified rules, as it was for USB charging, among other things.

It will naturally get a lot of flack and a few people/companies will make it their scapegoat as to deflect from them as usual, but that's - sadly - almost normal now.

Is it all good: no!

Is it a good start: yes!

Is it IMPOSSIBLE to comply: heck no, I'm working at a small Austrian company and we had to change almost nothing, as lo and behold, we have no desire to be a data kraken and tried to held the privacy of our customer and users always on a reasonable level. As we'd wish that others do with our data and use of service...

adventured4• 8 years ago

I think many (most?) companies will implement these privacy policies across all of their users

In terms of percentages, exceptionally few businesses outside of the EU will implement GDPR. The rest of the world will overwhelmingly entirely ignore it.

There are 20 million businesses in the US. 500,000 new businesses are created each year. 0.1% or less will comply with GDPR. Why? Because very few US businesses ever do business with the EU.

A small clothing retail shop from Texas or Florida or Michigan is not going to concern itself with complying with GDPR just because they took three orders from the EU. They're going to ignore GDPR and continue doing business as they always have. And the EU is going to find it entirely impossible to enforce compliance for those types of small instances due to the scale & tracking required to do so. If by chance they develop a larger EU business, then they'll comply.

Further, how do you force compliance on a US clothing shop from Florida, that sells 27 items per year into the EU, and violates GDPR (while having zero presence in the EU)? They can't, unless the EU develops a Chinese firewall.

The extremely majority of small businesses in India and China also do not do business with the EU. They will not be worried about GDPR. That's true about nearly all the rest of the businesses around the globe.

merinowool23• 8 years ago

How do you check if someone is an EU resident?

LoSboccacc6• 8 years ago

same with the age check, you ask them

bausshf5• 8 years ago

Geolocation, IP Lookup etc. You generally shouldn't care whether they're a resident in the EU, but just whether they are in EU or not. Remember GDPR doesn't cover any citizens from EU who aren't in EU.

AnabeeKnox9• 8 years ago

Perhaps something similar to the supersuccesful EU "cookie law" where a website could ask you on your first visit if you are an EU citizen.

Wait, or is it EU residents and not just citizens? Be sure to get that correct.

tobylane• 8 years ago

EU residents in the EU, EU citizens worldwide.

merinowool23• 8 years ago

This is just an author wishlist and not the reality. I especially find the "clearing house" fantasy amusing. How he thinks this house of bureaucrats will be able to judge that John Does complaint has any merit?

orcdork• 8 years ago

I recognized your user name from the other thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17095217), it looks like you've made up your mind (to the point where your comments where ridiculous enough to be deleted) and no amount of argument will even get you to consider any other options.

Why don't you tell us how you really feel?

zone411• 8 years ago

And the author of this article, who was also very active in the same thread hasn't made up his mind?

merinowool23• 8 years ago

I am only trying to understand why people feel so easy about it. I read hundreds of articles on the topic and nobody really has a clue what is going to happen. That my comments were deemed ridiculous and deleted is the symptom how crazy this whole thing is.

rnnr2• 8 years ago

Plus it gives easy access to the government to peek at your data without any significant clause. Your data are theirs too now.

icebraining8• 8 years ago

That's not how it works. They don't send a guy to look at your databases.

icebraining8• 8 years ago

How he thinks this house of bureaucrats will be able to judge that John Does complaint has any merit?

The same way judges can throw out a case without going to trial. Checking if the complaint makes sense, if it represents an actual violation as described, etc. Anyone dealing with the public knows that a huge chunk of the complaints don't even pass that bar.

merinowool23• 8 years ago

John Doe says company has personal information on him and doesn't want to delete it. Shows email exchange with the company and company is stating they don't have his personal data, so there is nothing to delete. How do they judge the case has a merit? Let's say a group forms on xchan type of site and flood company and "clearing house" with such claims.

StreamBright2• 8 years ago

Exactly. People try to explain to me how it is impossible to comply and usually it turns out that it would be easy. I think the problem most of time that people misunderstanding the requirements or not reading GDPR (not even TLDR versions).

merinowool23• 8 years ago

It is easy if they believe particular person's interpretation. But that doesn't mean they are right. People have huge problems with interpreting written word if it is not written without a room for interpretation and if you add to the mix bureaucrats that have targets to meet you'll see it will not be easy at all.

dtf• 8 years ago

What targets? Where have you heard something about targets?

bengale• 8 years ago

I think the biggest complaint I've heard so far is that there is too much room for interepration at the moment, we currently lack any case law.

willvarfar4• 8 years ago

Am in EU, am involved in some compliance stuff and have talked to plenty others at other companies, and it really does seem to be a nothing-to-see-here for all companies except the sleezy ones.

windowsworkstoo• 8 years ago

The only person who’s opinion you should worry about is your internal legal counsel’s. The nerds who try to carry on like this is a technical problem with a technical solution are so far off. It’s about beig able to argue and justify your interpretation - not how much you have gold plated your tech stack

DanBC23• 8 years ago

All law has room for interpretation, that's what the courts are for.

There are no targets for bureaucrats.

AnabeeKnox9• 8 years ago

There is no "TLDR" of the GDPR. It has to all be read, understood and complied with. This is basic legal compliance, and is not at all easy for a small business.

gcthomas8• 8 years ago

Yes, and it is not that hard a read. The only problems people seem to be having are in trying to finesse the rules to avoid looking after data with due diligence. If you really want to look after data, then you just need to do that, and you will be compliant.

orwin2• 8 years ago

And if you are a small/medium business, don't comply and somehow are reported, you will receive an email from the regalutory instance of the country the person who reported you come from. They will tell you what is wrong and point you to some articles who can give you advices on how to comply. If you have difficulty to do so, you can contact them and ask specific advices, they will respond (probably a bit late) and as long as you comply with the RGPD within a month after that, you're good.

Audit can take some time and have a real impact on your business though, so i'm not saying everything is perfect. But to me, audit is the only thing you have to be really afraid of, not fines.

bausshf5• 8 years ago

It's especially hard for a small sized business where all your clients are either departments of the government or leasing companies.

StreamBright2• 8 years ago

There is TLDR version, it is called the checklist. Here is one:

https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/resources-and-support/d...

It captures the compliance with a checklist which is shorter than the original 88 page law.

Malarkey734• 8 years ago

Hear hear...

willvarfar4• 8 years ago

If you’re Mark Zuckerberg however I would definitely advise not to ignore this, however the chances of Mark reading this blog post are nil.

As this is top of HN, perhaps there is a good chance he will read this because of the his FB staff who read this and can't resist telling him? :)

xtrapolate2• 8 years ago

There's currently no case law surrounding GDPR. Moreover, some elements of the GDPR are up for interpretation. People are rightfully concerned.

"This post is an attempt to calm the nerves of those that feel that the(ir) world is about to come to an end"

This post is actually a single person's viewpoint, a mere speculation of how things may or may not turn out to be. Your mileage may vary.

zorked• 8 years ago

I guess we should only enact new laws which already have established case law. /s

xtrapolate2• 8 years ago

"I guess we should only enact new laws which already have established case law. /s"

I disagree with the author's lenient and dismissive take on people's genuine concerns. Interpret it as you will.

icebraining8• 8 years ago

The GDPR is not completely new, though; it's a reformulation and extension of the existing Data Protection Directive, which was implemented back in 1995.

TazeTSchnitzel• 8 years ago

For people and businesses in the EEA, the GDPR is much less of a change, because we already had to comply with data protection law. The rest of the world may be less prepared.

nabla94• 8 years ago

Legal system in European Union leans heavily towards civil law (aka Roman law) and the case law is secondary.

AnabeeKnox9• 8 years ago

I was hoping for a nice respite to the anti-GDPR stuff we've seen recently, but this is just naked propaganda. In particular, the sentence:

"the GDPR has the potential to escalate to those levels but in the spirit of the good natured enforcers ..."

The author seems to have the idea that bureaucratic EU systems are inherently "good" and that even if things look bad on paper, it will be fine because they are "good" people. This is not how the legal system or legal compliance works.

orwin2• 8 years ago

Do you have any experience with a Eu country internet regulatory service? I have experience with the CNIL (The french one), and they were helpfull and yes, good-natured. Part of our demand to be able to host data from hospital was drafted with their help, when they had no legal obligation to help us. A friend who work in a legal/tech startup also had good experience with them, and i don't know anybody who ever had a bad run with them. So if you have contradictory experience, please share them. Until then, i'll still take all this "GDPR will kill tech companies" articles from people who only experienced the US legal system as jokes.

AnabeeKnox9• 8 years ago

You seem to have misunderstood my comment. I was saying that from a legal complience perspective, the notion that the regulatary body is "good-natured" is meaningless. You have to comply with ever letter of the GDPR, you can't just do most of it, or interpret it loosely, and say "oh but they are good-natured people they will understand.". Legal complience doesn't work like that AT ALL!

vidarh3• 8 years ago

I think this is a very distinct difference between the EU with the scaremongering removed, and e.g. the US: My experience of the EU has been that they've consistently looked out for my interests. Even in the face of the local government (I live in the UK) that have kept fighting for positions I find abhorrent (e.g. UK governments keep complaining about having to abide by EU human rights regulations for example).

Yes, we shouldn't aim to give governments power to push things to an extreme, but on the other hand we should also ensure that they have the ability to actually react to serious abuses.

In particularly in the area of data protection, I don't know of a single example where the rules have been pushed to the extreme. If anything, as a private citizen I'm disappointed there's not been stricter enforcement. As someone who has had to deal with it on the corporate side as well, it's not been hard to comply with.

Enforcement here is generally always strongly predicated on not jumping straight to the strictest possible outcome, but in carefully considering how serious a transgression is. It's not that EU systems are inherently good, but that history and practice have shown that when they give flexibility, it takes serious abuses and ill intent to end up with the strictest reactions allowed, and there'd also be little reason to assume that anyone rushing to the strictest interpretations possible wouldn't get shut down hard by the courts.

AnabeeKnox9• 8 years ago

You are transposing your like of certain EU institutions (human rights regulations) and grafting them onto this legislation. This isn't how it works, not least because there has been no case-law yet, so we have no idea how it will be interpreted. Therefore a legal compliance unit has no choice but to follow GDPR the letter, which is hugely difficult and bureaucratic. The notion that they are "good-natured" is meaningless in a legal sense.

It seems many commentators here are confusing criticism of the GDPR with criticism of the EU itself. Surely people are sophisticated enough to understand that they are 2 hugely different things, and that a robust criticism of regulations and laws are part of a healthy democratic society.

walshemj2• 8 years ago

Not sure id 100% agree and they are at the mercy of individual governments who have in some cases gone against the spirt of some of the eu regs for example Spain's implementation of TUPE.

iamnothere• 8 years ago

Indeed, just look at the tragedy that is the EPO.

My chief concern is that this will end up being an instrument wielded by big business (through political connections) at the expense of smaller companies, especially smaller overseas competitors but also domestically. If EU-US relations continue to sour, it could also become a weapon in a hypothetical trade war, which I guess is probably one of the "benefits" from an EU government perspective.

Codifying privacy protection is important, but GDPR favors big companies and governments too strongly over already risk-burdened entrepreneurs.

oblio6• 8 years ago

Are you American or European? US law (common law) works very differently from European law (civil law).

SomeGermanGuy6• 8 years ago

Thanks for this article. I wholeheartedly support your stance of: > In that case please shut down or do not serve EU customers

Malarkey734• 8 years ago

Here in UK I have been receiving about 5-10 emails a day from various companies - most of whom I don't remember - telling me I need to sign up again so they can keep my details and keep spamming me.

Fantastic.

SomeGermanGuy6• 8 years ago

I have the same experience. All those forgotten accounts. Now I can just go on and delete them.

Super basic stuff.

vidarh3• 8 years ago

I'm loving that too. It's amazing just how many mailing lists I'm on that I either haven't signed up for myself or have forgotten about.

Malarkey734• 8 years ago

Indeed. I was reading a tragic article about the energy cost of bitcoin and I started to wonder how much energy, bandwidth,HD space is totally wasted on sending everybody spam, junk, messages every day that they will never read. And keeping info for the same. I wonder if it is a reasonably large chunk of the total energy and infrastructure of the whole web?

Maybe we could power a big Chinese city just by getting ourselves deleted from gym mailing lists (weirdly a gym in Cardiff sends me spam mail -- I have never been to Cardiff???).

akerro• 8 years ago

Same here, finally recruitment agencies will unsubscribe me from jobs offers that I'm totally not interested in. I used to get a few emails per week asking me if I'm interested for relocation and work in [insert programming language I have no experience in]. I asked them many times to stop emailing me this crap, they never did until this week :)

Cakez0r• 8 years ago

I will be interested to see if the same companies do actually stop emailing me and delete my information after I ignore their request to opt in!

Malarkey734• 8 years ago

I'm sure there are plenty of bad actors who will keep spamming regardless. Thankfully those ones seldom get through my spam filter - so barely trouble my consciousness.

ThePhysicist3• 8 years ago

Yes same for me, and I think it's a great thing because my information leakage risk will shrink significantly in the next weeks due to companies deleting data they have from me that they should've deleted long ago in many cases.

timrichard• 8 years ago

I'm also deluged with them. And have to go looking for half of them in the Spam folder. Deep joy.

The reason being that in the past I've picked up some really nice contracts from recruitment agencies phoning or emailing me out of the blue, so I want to remain contactable.

So, yeah. Great. Thanks for the massive proxy unsubscribe request.

brynjolf• 8 years ago

I have a lot of companies emailing me saying I can opt-out, I thought that was the opposite of what the law is saying? Eg. If you continue using our service after 23th of May you automatically agree to the new terms. Huh?

jdietrich6• 8 years ago

The GDPR requires affirmative consent for each specific use of your data. If the company had previously asked you "Please tick this box if you would like to receive marketing messages from us in the future", they don't need to ask for your consent again but they do need to offer an opt-out. If the opt-in was pre-ticked, vaguely worded or mandatory to submit the form, then that consent is no longer valid and they'll need to ask you to opt-in. If you didn't specifically opt-in but were getting marketing messages because you had done business with them, they need an opt-in to keep sending those messages.

SiempreViernes• 8 years ago

I got a mail from a sports club I'm pretty sure I've never visited asking me to please reply to remain subscribed. That was weird, wonder if I visited their stadium once for a concert or if someone just misstyped their mail.

Hamuko• 8 years ago

I bought something on Ebay and the Ebay seller has been spamming me with offers ever since. I didn't sign up to any newsletter. I was not aware that such thing would even be possible with Ebay.

Now they sent me a message telling me that I should sign up again on their website to continue getting their messages. No thanks.

tlrobinson• 8 years ago

Is the system of warnings and increasing fines described in the post a part of the law, or does one need to rely on the "spirit of the good natured enforcers" if they are unable (or unwilling) to immediately comply fully?

riffraff• 8 years ago

It is, but in a vague way, see article 83[0], where to choose what fine to apply you must consider, amongst other things:

(f) the degree of cooperation with the supervisory authority, in order to remedy the infringement and mitigate the possible adverse effects of the infringement

If an authority did not go this way any fine could be voided by an appeal.

[0] http://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-5419-2016-IN...

LoSboccacc6• 8 years ago

I was actually surprised by how easy it is to read it

there's a whole two hundred post debate around here whether ip are or aren't pii on their own, with the wast majority holding the wrong position.

there's a whole branch of gdpr that people aren't considering, which is not related to software but to your business (i.e. your mail calendar). you also need a privacy policy if you are receiving phone calls. did you know that?

there's a whole bunch of implication on how liable you are about holding unwanted personal information, including unwanted medical personal information i.e. "hi I saw your gazebo renting service, I'm organizing an event but I am unable to walk due a permanent disability and requiring a ramp is present to access your gazebo, is that so?"

there is a huge surface area for uncertainty, up and including 'best practices' that are a constantly shifting target.

edit: to clarify the calendar part: if you have a meeting with someone, that links an identity with a location. that's why it's an issue, even without considering the address book, which is another issue by itself.

zaarn4• 8 years ago

there's a whole two hundred post debate around here whether ip are or aren't pii on their own.

Largely pointless. EU courts have in the past ruled that IPs are personal data because they can be tracked back to a person. End of story.

there's a whole branch of gdpr that people aren't considering, which is not related to software but to your business (i.e. your mail calendar).

was largely already covered by the previous EU privacy law and the german privacy law. Courts largely agree that calendars for appointments are fine as long as you keep them reasonably secure and don't throw them around in public.

you also need a privacy policy if you are receiving phone calls. did you know that?

Yes I did. I informed myself when I registered as a small business.

LoSboccacc6• 8 years ago

Largely pointless. IPs are personal data

I know. I'm on that side. Can link you to dozens threads where the comment stating ip are pii are downvoted to hell asunder and false myths spread like wildfire.

Courts largely agree that calendars for appointments are fine

yes, but for online calendars the provider is a processor and need to be listed as such. and when a customer exercise the right of being forgotten, you'll need to go back and delete the meetings. all new stuff I'm quite sure the majority forgot to consider.

Yes I did. I informed myself

good for you, doesn't mean there are a lot of business that didn't, and considering the false myth spread around here, this board needs to hear as much as possible about these things.

apple4ever13• 8 years ago

Largely pointless. EU courts have in the past ruled that IPs are personal data because they can be tracked back to a person. End of story.

They are wrong. IPs are not personal data. End of story.

tom_mellior2• 8 years ago

you also need a privacy policy if you are receiving phone calls. did you know that?

You mean your website needs to have a note next to your phone number saying something like "we will not record your phone calls", and if there isn't, you're liable to be fined?

LoSboccacc6• 8 years ago

that or a mention directly at the start of the conversation.

DanBC23• 8 years ago

No, people were correctly answering the specific question: is an IP address on its own personal data? (No, it can't be used to identify a natural person).

THe problem is that it's a stupid question. No-one has just IP addresses, they have a mix of data. If you can combine the IP address with anything else to identify a natural person it becomes personal data.

LoSboccacc6• 8 years ago

And you’re wrong

Ip are personal data https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection/refo...

Without conditions. Even hashing them doesn’t make them ‘irreversibly anonimized’ because the ip space is too small for hashing to be irreversible. A rainbow table can be built with all ips and use to deanonimize the ip.

ryanwaggoner4• 8 years ago

Haha, the response to your comment here is a perfect example of how ambiguous this law is: you yourself are disagreeing with official interpretations of this law. And the blog post that we’re commenting on here says that personal projects have to comply, while you have posted multiple times saying they don’t?

It’d be really nice for the “fucking idiots” that you referred to earlier if those of you who clearly know what the law says and what it means could get your stories straight.

hitechnomad• 8 years ago

GDPR is just good data protection practice.

zaarn4• 8 years ago

Don’t Panic

That's thoroughly good advice. Panic reduces efficiency and the capability to react rationally.

Becoming compliant with this law will cause my business to go under
If becoming compliant with the law will cause your business to go under that is more or less the same as saying that your business is built on gross privacy violations. So if that’s your busines model then good riddance to you and your company

Hmm, I would nitpick on that, Google Adsense has been ass about getting GDPR compliant, they don't offer any method of serving ads without storing consent including their tracking-free ads. This is not something that affects me personally but I know people running larger websites that rely entirely on ad revenue (premium model is hard since they drive visitors with UGC, most people don't have an account, they don't want to paywall anything or ask money from the people that drive traffic). The site itself is already fully compliant and with exception of very minor changes (minimum age 13 -> 16, adding a "download everything" button) was compliant in the past.

I blame Adsense on that one, not GDPR though. The ad industry has to adapt, pushing the work on the website operators won't help and is not appropriate. IMO Adsense should either offer a fully consent-free ad experience in compliance with the GDPR or operate the consent dialog for the website owner in a non-intrusive manner.

Maybe this means there will be an opening for a GDPR-compliant adnetwork in Europe

raquo4• 8 years ago

The problem of multiple ambiguities in GDPR hasn't really been addressed here.

Also, must be nice to live in a country where the regulator is as benevolent and reasonable as is described in this article.

I think it's ok for foreigners to be skeptical of this promise, as the article implies that this reasonableness is not encoded in law.

gcthomas8• 8 years ago

The regulators have been running for two decades, and this is EXACTLY how they operate. Scepticism in this case is unreasonable, given the massive evidence base.

wott• 8 years ago

The regulators have been running for two decades,

Exactly 4 decades in France (it started in 1978).

repolfx8• 8 years ago

But that's purely your own opinion.

I do have some direct experience of working with EU data protection regulators. My experience has been that they vary wildly in "reasonableness". UK ICO is pretty OK, they want companies to succeed. France's CNIL is a joke. Petty, spiteful and utterly inconsistent. I watched as a company worked closely with them to get their sign-off on a change to their terms of service and privacy policy. CNIL were happy to be involved and taken so seriously, they were satisfied with the changes and even praised them in private. After the company announced the change, some journalists saw an opportunity to make some noise and did so. CNIL then immediately changed their mind and dished out a fine, despite having previously agreed to it. What a farce.

That's at the national level. I can give many examples of cases where the EU has been anything but reasonable.

The entire argument Jaques presents here boils down to his belief that everyone working in GDPR enforcement in the EU will not only be totally predictable and reasonable today but also going forward into the indefinite future.

As pointed out in the other thread, this belief is itself unreasonable, because the nature of the GDPR means that even in the unlikely even it's true today, if in 10 years a new Commission arrives and changes their mind they can retroactively decide that things previously allowed were actually illegal. The GDPR says virtually nothing about anything so they'd certainly argue such a thing was merely a "clarification" and not a retroactive change to the law.

There are plenty of examples of governments doing this sort of thing over time, including the EU, like with Apple's tax situation. Mr Mattheij appears to just write this possibility off entirely.

frereubu9• 8 years ago

Law is by its nature open to interpretation and based on precedent. Otherwise there wouldn't be courts of appeal and supreme courts. What's so special about GDPR that makes you think it will be abused more than other laws?

raquo4• 8 years ago

The "special" part is that it prescribes very specific things in very ambiguous terms.

You have to change what you're doing to be compliant, but you don't know how. And for some aspects, no one knows how.

And GDPR actually has teeth. It's ripe for selective enforcement and other bureaucracy failures.

BjoernKW6• 8 years ago

What you're describing is the way common law works. Most European jurisdictions work under a civil law system.

Angostura5• 8 years ago

The problem of multiple ambiguities in GDPR hasn't really been addressed here.

Such as?

Also, must be nice to live in a country where the regulator is as benevolent and reasonable as is described in this article.

It is, thanks.

raquo4• 8 years ago

OTOH

- Scope outside of Europe – e.g. if a completely foreign entity that offers a Spanish or French translation of its service could potentially be covered by GDPR, even if they're not marketing to EU markets specifically. Too bad for Quebec I guess. Or what if you fly to speak at a conference in Europe – is that "marketing" to residents of EU? Depends on your slides? Or not? Who knows.

- Consent – does X fall under "legitimate interest"? Is it essential to providing the service? These are not easy to definitively answer for any non-trivial application. And it's not like you can just err on the side of caution – you are not allowed to ask for more consent than you need IIRC. And if the regulator (one of them) disagrees with you after you've spent a few years building a business relying on a certain interpretation, tough luck I guess, try again?

- How to deal with backups that contain personal information

BjoernKW6• 8 years ago

that this reasonableness is not encoded in law.

This is the main issue with this regulation in my opinion. Some of the recent statements by EU officials on that matter verge on absolutist notions of law: "Don't worry. Authorities will be lenient and benevolent." This is how absolutist kings argued why there shouldn't be a constitution or a state under the rule of law.

ealexhudson2• 8 years ago

I'm not sure about the point regarding the DPD. EU Directives themselves don't have teeth, but they're supposed to be transposed into national laws - e.g. the DPA in the UK - and would be enforced nationally. A regulation comes into law across the EU, but is still often transposed, and the enforcement mechanism (to begin with) is still basically the same.

He's right that the DPD was not well-adhered to, though.

gcthomas8• 8 years ago

The problem with the laws stemming from the DPD was that there were different laws in each EU country, and the enforcement options were too weak for slippery international corporations.

One critical change in the GDPR is the mandatory reporting of significant breaches. Before, it was entirely optional, so reports could come out years after the even once the material surfaced online.

ealexhudson2• 8 years ago

Sure, it wasn't consistent, but the argument about lack of enforcement really comes down to the national regulators not taking their jobs seriously enough or being given sufficient resources. The ICO in the UK has only ever issued pretty small beer fines.

The problem with self-regulation in this area is that there is significant competitive advantage to be gained by not being particularly careful. In that sense, I think GDPR evens the playing field.

mrleiter• 8 years ago

The GDPR gets so much hate because it hits so many businesses where it hurts: data. GDPR "simply" gives you guidelines on how you can handle data from people within the EU. And that that data cannot be handled so liberally as it has been before. Of course that's annoying from a business perspective, but from an individuals privacy perspective, it's fantastic.

zerostar078• 8 years ago

I think it gets "hate" from people who don't have much data but they still have to implement all the requirements, which go beyond than their own data storage. Ad-supported websites are probably the most common case here, even if the sites don't store any data themselves.

sdoering7• 8 years ago

And that is a good thing. This >23 different trackers and adservers just to read crappy news content BS is so nice to be shaken.

I really love the GDPR for just making the life for such business models way harder.

Implementing data, analytics, tracking and stuff in a way that is compliant with GDPR (or its local equivalents) is doable and from an architectural point of view even interesting imho.

I love building GDPR conforming data architectures with my clients right now.

mstolpm• 8 years ago

Or perhaps these people/businesses have much more data about you and don't want to share how they monetize their "free" services by selling/renting/aggregating/analyzing your data?

Think of all the free apps: I was in a conference with startup founders bragging about the business they make selling the location data of app users by incorporating some third party libraries in their apps without the users knowing. Of course, everything is anonymized, is it?

Add-supported websites on the other hand have only to document what is going on and get the consent of the user. That's a simple notification bar with a button, like the cookie notice, plus a page detailing the privacy policy. The GDPR even mentions legitime reasons for collecting, storing and transmitting personal identifiable data like technical or business needs. And in addition, almost all ad networks are going to anonymize IP addresses by stripping some bits and have opt-out features for being profiled.

rmc5• 8 years ago

Ad-supported websites are probably the most common case here, even if the sites don't store any data themselves.

Internet advertising is a viper pit of privacy invasion. They didn't get their house in order, and let it turn into the horrible mess it is today, so they shouldn't be surprised that the regulators stepped in.

omginternets5• 8 years ago

I don't think that's fair.

I rather think it gets a lot of hate because it leaves a lot to the discretion of the regulators. Overall, the SMEs I talk to don't have a problem with regulating data (most think it will pop the gangrenous ad-tech bubble). It's the lack of predictability that bothers them.

DanBC23• 8 years ago

The "lack of predictability" is a good thing.

"You're making efforts to comply with the regulations, but could you have a look at how you're storing this and that?"

"You're not compliant with the regulation so we have to impose a fine"

Are you really saying you'd prefer the second?

hartator11• 8 years ago

What’s fantastic about it? Worst abusers of privacy are goverments, and nothing has been done in this law to restrict it.

thomaskcr3• 8 years ago

It's not that it's annoying, it's that I literally cannot answer "are we GDPR compliant?". If you search for GDPR IP address, you get a ton of different opinions. Do I need to sanitize logs? How does that fit in with the requirements for security compliance we are also subject to?

At the end of the day, I am the one person who has to answer that question/is responsible for being GDPR compliant. I've spent hours doing research, figuring out what we need to do and implementing it -- and it's a hollow victory because even though I've said yes and have 100s of articles/white papers/opinions that back up the decisions I've made, the real answer is still "I don't know".

And I absolutely know I'm not alone in this. I got GDPR compliance dropped on my lap because I did security compliance -- if you contrast NIST 800-53/800-171 against GDPR you'll see why people are pissed off. One has clear guidelines with enough room for evolving best practices written by obviously competent/experienced professionals, the other is written as basically "we'll know it when we see it".

guitarbill4• 8 years ago

So everything should be written out explicitly, because you'd rather complete a checkbox-ticking exercise rather than thinking about it and do the correct, ethical thing in good faith?

Sounds like a win for the GDPR to me, we know rigid checkbox-ticking is ineffective.

Apart from that, NIST 800-53/800-171 are catalogs of "security controls and associated assessment procedures" for "Federal Information Systems and Organizations". GDPR is a data protection regulation in the context of the EU legal system. Apples to oranges.

vladimir_prus• 8 years ago

GDPR fundamentally cannot tell whether storing of IP addresses is OK - because it's the processing of personal data for a specific purpose that can be lawful or not, and there's infinite number of possible processing purposes.

For example, if you're a CDN business, and naturally need to fight DDOS attacks, then storing exact IP addresses for all requests for a few weeks easily falls under "legitimate interest" (GDPR 6.1.f). On the other hand, if you're a political news site, then storing IP addresses and URL for the purpose of determining political preferences of people without their consent is very clearly illegal, taking into account that IP address can often be static and so identify specific person.

Yes, it means that you have some decisions to do yourself, and the regulator might disagree with your decisions, but that's true about pretty much every new law, no?

Sangermaine3• 8 years ago

Of course that's annoying from a business perspective, but from an individuals privacy perspective, it's fantastic.

So many people are pro-privacy until it affects their bottom line.

gist• 8 years ago

The GDPR gets so much hate

Hate? Try to think of it from a business in the US perspective that wants to know why they have to (for lack of a better way to put it) bogu to an entity that does not represent them in any way. And the fact that you might sell something or service customers in Europe does not mean you should have to answer to any rules that they setup either. Should the town that I live in and operate a web site out of be able to have rules in place and then go after citizens in the EU for not abiding by them?

And actually it's one step further since many of the procedures and rules are being taken broadly and universally even against entities (businesses and us persons) that aren't even covered by the GDPR.

And no it's not like 'oh if you want to sell a car in Europe you need to certify this and that' that is not the same thing. Why? Well for one thing the golden rule. If you want that car allowed through the port you need to do what they tell you to do or they have a right to not allow it on their land. In this case their citizens are utilizing US websites and therefore it's on them to determine if they feel the service or product they are getting is fit.

I am referring to US businesses that don't have an office or physical presence in Europe. To those that do the 'golden rule' applies.

ckocagil• 8 years ago

There have been many people extradited to the US for infringing US copyright laws.

beachy4• 8 years ago

This doesn't consider some factors that dictate how strong any company will experience their firehose of GDPR requests to be:

- how incentivised people are to make GDPR subject access requests of the company (how angry, confused, hostile curious they are)

- how easy it is for them to make requests (entirely manual vs. online service)

- wildcard factors (internet flash mobs bent on vengeance against a corporate)

There are also possible business models that might incentivize technology players to deliberately ramp up GDPR requests.

For example, unsuccessful candidates applying for a job at a company could forward their rejection email to a bot. The bot parses the details and fires a GDPR access request in to the HR department. The candidate gets back a formatted dump by email of all sorts of recruitment data, including interview notes, etc. There are obvious ways to monetise a service like this, hence incentive for someone to do it. Recruitment at a large company means engaging with thousands of people and then rejecting them. It is natural for people to have bruised feelings, and also to be curious about why they were not hired. A GDPR button lets them indulge their curiousity and start digging in to interview notes etc.

Naturally GDPR requests like this won't flood a company on the first day of GDPR. But the internet is a turbulent place.

AnabeeKnox9• 8 years ago

I agree, and there seems to be a lack of conversation around this! Next week could be ground-zero for all sorts of unintended consequences. Especially, a flashmob of GDPR requests could sink a company.

Marazan• 8 years ago

If it is difficult and time consuming for you to answer a GDPR request then your data handling practices are bad and you should feel bad.

cbg011• 8 years ago

It is highly unlikely that a lot of requests will "sink" your company. As per the GDPR, you have a month to respond to requests and you can extend this period by two more months by telling the user that you need more time to process their request. (See article 12 for reference)

bkor5• 8 years ago

Enabling people to force a company into bankruptcy using the GDPR is not the intention.

From https://gdpr-info.eu/art-12-gdpr/:

"Where requests from a data subject are manifestly unfounded or excessive, in particular because of their repetitive character, the controller may either: "

The quoted bit is about one person, not multiple so not directly applicable. I assume if someone organizes a coordinated flood of requests from multiple persons you can still argue that it is excessive.

I agree that the amount of requests is very uncertain. Within my company I'm planning to make one request (data regarding me as an employee). This to see if they're prepared.

pheleven4• 8 years ago

I was thinking a solid new business plan is to register gdpr.me (or whatever) and offer a service. $40, fill out a form, and I will send a GDPR request to every company in the world on your behalf. The data coming back is then offered back to you with the ability to create further requests (deletion for example) selectively or in full.

This seem explicitly allowed for in the law.

frereubu9• 8 years ago

This sounds like the arguments that organisations make against freedom of information laws. There is that risk, but what is the alternative? There doesn't seem to be a middle ground to me - either people can make subject access requests or they can't.

repolfx8• 8 years ago

FOI laws apply to governments, not corporations.

And yes, civil servants did use those arguments to try and stop FOI. They lost because ultimately they pay themselves out of tax revenues, and when you force people to buy something the bar for denying them information about how that money is used is a lot higher.

This doesn't apply in the case of companies and especially not job candidates.

beachy4• 8 years ago

Not an alternative - but the only obvious defence is to do the right thing, and delete data as soon as you have completed processing. e.g. delete those interview notes the second you have declined the candidate.

llukas• 8 years ago

The candidate gets back a formatted dump by email of all sorts of recruitment data, including interview notes, etc.

Unless data is removed before end of the process and company keeps only final outcome. ;)

_Codemonkeyism3• 8 years ago

If you don't have a talent pool, one should remove all candidate data after rejection. It's probably better to outsource talent pools.

beachy4• 8 years ago

Outsourcing your talent pools - literally the future of your company - would be an extreme step just to ensure GDPR compliance.

gcthomas8• 8 years ago

There is an exemption for vexacious or disproportionately costly requests, so once everything has settled down and it is clear how the regulators deal with complaints, then it should work out ok.

kartan• 8 years ago

and also to be curious about why they were not hired. A GDPR button lets them indulge their curiousity and start digging in to interview notes etc.

If your company can not show the candidates why they were not hired, you are doing a very bad job.

Are you discriminating against protected classes?

Are you rude or offensive in your comments?

Then, stop doing it. That will be a very good side-effect of this situation. Public scrutiny works. If a company needs to make public their interview notes, that notes are going to improve quality and abide to law.

how strong any company will experience their firehose of GDPR requests to be

If you are big enough to have a big influx of GDPR, you need to automate it.

how easy it is for them to make requests

It needs to be easy. The goal is not to let your company shield behind "sorry it is too complicated to give you the information". You need to give people easy access to their own data.

wildcard factors

How is this difference of a Denial of service attack on the technical side? On the legal part, there are lawsuits that are going to be more effective than GDPR that starts with recommendations for improvement.

The candidate gets back a formatted dump by email of all sorts of recruitment data, including interview notes, etc. There are obvious ways to monetise a service like this, hence incentive for someone to do it.

You only get the data about YOUR own interview. You can not hoard data this way. It works the other way around. The data protection is protecting you from the company monetizing this information without your consent. Companies are the ones hoarding YOUR personal data and creating a business around it without YOUR consent.

Your concerns are the main reason GDPR was created.

grigjd32• 8 years ago

Ok, why you aren't hired has nothing to do with internet privacy. It is also good practice not to tell people why because some will and do sue whether or not the potential employer did anything wrong.

mbesto2• 8 years ago

If your company can not show the candidates why they were not hired, you are doing a very bad job.

You sound like you've never had to deal with telling a candidate they weren't chosen for a position. There's a reason rejection letters are usually canned responses - it's not that HR teams are unanimously evil people, it's because any bit of information could open up the potential for a law suit, even if in good spirit. Someone gets a rejection letter saying "they aren't a good fit"...oh well it must be because I have different colored skin, right? It's a slippery slope from there.

pjc5019• 8 years ago

You can do this already with the existing Data Protection Act. Businesses have not drowned in subject access requests. People seem to forget that data protection isn't new, it's just being beefed up a bit.

https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...

Another link from 2012 describing how to handle data protection in the 1998 framework: http://www.shoosmiths.co.uk/client-resources/legal-updates/D...

Macha• 8 years ago

See "Europe vs Facebook" for another pre-GDPR example where people were obtaining data Facebook stored on them via existing data protection laws: http://www.europe-v-facebook.org/EN/en.html

A_No_Name_Mouse• 8 years ago

The candidate gets back a formatted dump by email of all sorts of recruitment data, including interview notes, etc.

Interview notes would not have to be turned over to the candidate. They are personal opinion of the interviewer even if they mention the candidate. GDPR protects that data: you may not disclose it because it would violate the rights of the interviewer.

pjc5019• 8 years ago

Do you have a citation for that?

M2Ys4U4• 8 years ago

That's not true.

Under the existing Data Protection Directive these notes are subject to people making a Subject Access Request.

desas3• 8 years ago

I work in recruitment within the EU and you are completely wrong.

Probably you can redact it so that it doesn't include the actual names of which interview panellist said what.

dragonwriter5• 8 years ago

For example, unsuccessful candidates applying for a job at a company could forward their rejection email to a bot. The bot parses the details and fires a GDPR access request in to the HR department. The candidate gets back a formatted dump by email of all sorts of recruitment data, including interview notes, etc. There are obvious ways to monetise a service like this, hence incentive for someone to do it. Recruitment at a large company means engaging with thousands of people and then rejecting them. It is natural for people to have bruised feelings, and also to be curious about why they were not hired. A GDPR button lets them indulge their curiousity and start digging in to interview notes etc.

Huh. So, you’re saying a side effect of GDPR is a radical increase in recruitment/hiring transparency. As if that was a bad thing (clearly, it would be a shift in the capital/labor power assymetry in favor of labor, but I'm not seeing how that's bad.)

frereubu9• 8 years ago

For those of you understandably intimidated by the GDPR regulations themselves, here's a good summary in plain English: https://blog.varonis.com/gdpr-requirements-list-in-plain-eng...

The UK's ICO also has a good structured summary: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-da...

In general I agree with the sentiments in this article. I've probably spent a total of three to four days reading around the GDPR and I don't really see what's special about this law other than it's imposing decent standards on what was in effect a wildly unregulated industry in people's personal data. If you have a broad distrust of any government activity then I suppose any new laws with "fines up to €X" might feel like "I run a small site on a Digital Ocean droplet and I'm at risk of a €2m fine out of the blue." But that doesn't make it true.

cbg011• 8 years ago

That Varonis link gets posted quite a bit, but it drastically over simplifies things and even tries to poke fun at some aspects of the legislation. The ICO site is a much better read for this.

Sverigevader• 8 years ago

Pardon me but, what does ICO site mean in this context?

frereubu9• 8 years ago

Fair point - my intent was to point out that some sources which are less intimidating than others. If all you read was the Varonis link you'd be in trouble, but if someone's the kind of person who thinks that they can read one blog post and understand the GDPR I'm not sure they're the kind of person that can be helped anyway...

AnabeeKnox9• 8 years ago

Reminder: you have to legally comply with every letter of the GDPR, not just the TLDR version. Saying "but we implemented the TLDR version" is not a legal defence.

tialaramex• 8 years ago

This concern applies to all laws though. Not murdering people doesn't require you to spend ages examining the exact text of a statutory definition of murder. The tl;dr version is enough for me to grasp that kicking somebody in the head until they stop breathing isn't allowed.

Arnt2• 8 years ago

Saying "we got the major stuff right, missed some of the details, sorry about that" will keep the fine small. And... de minimis non curat lex.

dantheman• 8 years ago

The amount of discretion and lack of clarity in the penalties is part of the problem. It opens you up to risk based on the whims of politics and the regulators and increases uncertainty. Laws should be clear, limited, and understandable - this is not.

frereubu9• 8 years ago

In an ideal world, yes. But that leads you down a Kafkaesque hole of bureaucracy - at some point you have to stop adding detail and leave things open to interpretation. There are plenty of laws out there with fines "up to €X" and, from my limited experience, I don't think the GDPR is especially ambiguous compared to others.

lyschoening• 8 years ago

The law says that the fines should be "effective, proportionate and dissuasive". That gives companies ample room to challenge a fine that is way out of proportion to the damages caused to their users.

davidhyde• 8 years ago

If the penalties were exact and written into the law then companies could simply make more from your privacy data than the fine they would have to pay. That would have the opposite effect of the law. Adding a clause that the fine is discretionary gives the enforcer the ability to adapt to this sort of behavior.

ThePhysicist3• 8 years ago

I really don't know why people think that the authorities will (or even could) automatically punish each minor infraction with 4 % of global revenue or 20 million €. GPDR article 87 specifies in great detail when fines should be imposed and how their value should be calculated, and the Article 29 WP also has a guideline on that:

https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/just/document.cfm?doc_id=47889

It is therefore simply not possible for a data protection authority to impose arbitrary or ridiculously high fines as they would never hold up in court.

rmc5• 8 years ago

based on the whims of politics and the regulators

Political whims? Maybe in the USA judges and prosecutors and police cheifs are elected every few years and these things are political and can change, but this isn't the case in many EU countries.

dspillett• 8 years ago

I don't really see what's special about this law

The key change is the fairly explicit punishments and apparent intent to hand them out for non-compliance. A lot of older regulations get considered by companies but the issues relegated, officially or otherwise, to "yeah, we'll apologise and fix that when someone notices" which might not be a good way to manage the risk management after next Friday.

... might feel like "I run a small site on a Digital Ocean droplet and I'm at risk of a €2m fine out of the blue." But that doesn't make it true.

Exactly. A lot of the unhelpful hysteria is being drummed up by consulting companies trying to sell there services to help others assess and/or manage their GDPR compliance: they are stoking the fears to improve sales.

The rest is coming from people who don't want to lose control of some of what they consider to be _their_ data. From a business perspective this is usually "I've collected it or pad for it, I should be able to keep it / sell it / use it, this is unfair, wa waa waaaaaa" and from a technical perspective many of us data people have flinch reactions to any idea of hard-delete or un-rollback-able update operations (they are not really impossible to rollback of course, anyone sensible is building considerations for backup retention policies into their procedures, but rolling back is less likely to be simple and can only be done during that retention window).

ciguy• 8 years ago

The consulting companies use exactly the same MO that Y2K consultants used. Cherry picking case studies and data sets to make executives think the sky is falling when in reality it's not all that hard to be compliant with GDPR and it really is comprehensible by an average person spending a day or 2 reading up on it.

SagelyGuru5• 8 years ago

I am concerned that the effect of this legislation on the private individual is the opposite of the stated intention.

People are being forced to sign agreements which jeopardise the natural rights to their data which they would otherwise have.

One example: a friend who has a very pretty daughter was asked by her school to give them the right to film her and to use any and all such recordings as they see fit for 50 years even after she leaves the school.

This feels very wrong on just about all the conceivable levels.

Jubok2• 8 years ago

What ? It's the opposite, it allow you to access and delete the data, even if you gave consent one time. And your image concern a lot of other old laws, even if you sell it you can get it back later.

pjc5019• 8 years ago

Is that a GDPR issue, or a copyright/"release" issue?

(note that privacy and GDPR issues apply differently for children)

natural rights to their data which they would otherwise have

This is not a thing. Data has traditionally "belonged" to the entity doing the recording of the data.

rovr138• 8 years ago

I am not sure where you are, but this is usually standard. You can’t film someone at a place where there’s some expected form of privacy and use that footage publicly.

Talking about GDPR, the fact they had to ask is proof it works. It’s an opt in. Your friend now has the option to say yes if they want to share it, but the default is no.

There are also provisions for withdrawing consent after giving it. The agreement can’t go above that law.

krageon7• 8 years ago

The only thing which would make that outrageous would be an element of force (which would make it not consent anyway, but I digress). Instead, you're giving an example that explicitly allows for a denial. That's exactly as it always should have been, so I really don't understand what the point is that you're trying to make here.

jdietrich6• 8 years ago

Art.7(3): "The data subject shall have the right to withdraw his or her consent at any time."

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-7-gdpr/

rmc5• 8 years ago

Under the GDPR, consent must be revokable, at any time, and as easy to withdraw consent as to give it. So you could sign that. Then 5 minutes later withdraw consent.

Additionally consent must be "freely given". If you would be punished (e.g. expelled from school) then you haven't given consent, so they can't use it.

downandout5• 8 years ago

There is nothing - and I do mean nothing - written into the GDPR that requires any warnings of any kind, or places any limits on fines, except for $10/$20 million or 4% of revenue, whichever is greater. Period. A multimillion-dollar fine without warning for a first, minor violation is perfectly lawful under GDPR. The idea that "yes it says that but we can trust EU regulators to not assess large fines against foreign companies, even though they would benefit handsomely from them" rings hollow to me.

laumars• 8 years ago

In principle I might agree with you, however the EU has a long history of striking a fair balance between consumer rights and commercial interests. There is no point, in history, of the EU doing anything remotely like you've described. Which actually gives me more faith in the GDPR than legislation in a corrupt ecosystem as corrupt individuals will find a way to warp legislation in their favor anyway.

So yes, I do trust the EU and their history has proven that the aforementioned idea isn't a hollow one.

omginternets5• 8 years ago

we can trust EU regulators

I want to stress that this is a major point of political polarization in Europe at the moment. Even if this claim is true, it warrants a clear and articulated defense.

simion314• 8 years ago

Isn't there wording that says the punishment is proportional with your transgression?

pjc5019• 8 years ago

There is actually an over-arching requirement for proportionality in all EU regulation: https://ukhumanrightsblog.com/2015/06/27/supreme-court-on-eu...

jdietrich6• 8 years ago

In England and Wales, you could be fined £10^99 for having a crumb of cannabis in your pocket. There is nothing - and I do mean nothing - written in the Misuse of Drugs Act that requires any warnings of any kind, or places any limits on fines. The maximum sentence for possession of a Class B controlled substance is five years imprisonment and an unlimited fine. Period. A fine larger than the number of atoms in the universe is perfectly lawful under the Misuse of Drugs Act. The idea that we can trust judges and sentencing guidelines rings hollow to me.

raverbashing5• 8 years ago

Yes and there's nothing saying I won't be arrested and thrown into a cell for the rest of my life if I say something incorrect by mistake when entering the US.

There's nothing that says IRS won't prosecute you if someone buys you a soda and you don't declare it as income.

Or that you won't be prosecuted by someone in the US if your blog has a copyrighted image and you don't receive a DMCA request that was sent to you.

See how ridiculous that sounds?

All fines can be administratively and judicially appealed.

meredydd2• 8 years ago

I think you and everyone making similar points in this thread are getting tripped up by the difference between rules-based regulation and principles-based regulation. This is unsurprising, given that the US is so heavily rules-based, but the EU (certainly the UK) has a long history of principles-based regulation.

In rules-based regulation, all the rules are spelled out in advance, and the regulator is basically an automaton once the rules are set. In principles-based regulation, the rules are extensive rather than complete and you expect the regulator to have some lattitude (and, if the system is well designed, a mechanism of recourse if they do something stupid).

An advocate of rules-based regulation would say this can make regulators unpredictable and capricious. An advocate of principles-based regulation would say it is an important safeguard against "rules-lawyering" and regulatory capture (especially the kind that ties new entrants up in check-box compliance that doesn't actually affect your business because all the rules have been worked around).

A classic example would be the time PayPal tried to tell the UK regulators they shouldn't be regulated like a financial institution (which is a claim they successfully made in the US). They pointed to chapter and verse of the relevant law, and said that according to subparagraph 2.b.c(iii)... and the relevant regulator essentially told them "shut up, you keep consumers' money for them and will be treated accordingly". As a result, the worst "PayPal took all my money and I can't get it back" stories generally do not come from the UK. (And when they do, they are accompanied by referrals to the Financial Conduct Authority, who have teeth.)

You can approve of this way of working or not, but the GDPR is a principles-based regulation, and you'll have to engage with it on those terms.

Certhas3• 8 years ago

That is absurd and wrong. The law says the fine needs to be proportionate:

GDPR 83.1: Each supervisory authority shall ensure that the imposition of administrative fines pursuant to this Article in respect of infringements of this Regulation referred to in paragraphs 4, 5 and 6 shall in each individual case be effective, proportionate and dissuasive.

p49k3• 8 years ago

A multimillion-dollar fine without warning for a first, minor violation is perfectly lawful under GDPR

Come on, this is just scaremongering. Newsflash: If you run a business, you are already responsible for adhering to hundreds of other laws in which the fines could reach millions. But you don't see people running around screaming that the world is ending, because they know that the laws will generally be applied fairly, given that a large economy (like that of the EU) relies on just application of laws to maintain stability.

Running a business, like anything else in life, requires the ability to make reasoned choices from somewhat ambiguous data. And the data here is somewhat ambiguous for good reason - it's to prevent businesses from exploiting loopholes and rendering the law ineffective. If you are going to crank the anxiety to 10 every time a situation like this occurs, you probably shouldn't be running a business or handling others' data in the first place.

madeofpalk2• 8 years ago

If you have a broad distrust of any government activity then I suppose any new laws with "fines up to €X" might feel like "I run a small site on a Digital Ocean droplet and I'm at risk of a €2m fine out of the blue." But that doesn't make it true.

Tomte3• 8 years ago

It doesn‘t need to be written there. It has been written elsewhere, long ago.

All state action is subject to judicial review, where proportionality is a big factor.

It‘s an aspect of due process that is being reviewed and enforced by every court, up to the constitutional courts.

Example: the German criminal code threatens „up to five years“ in prison for theft.

That does not mean that a first-time theft of a not-too-valuable object could get you five years. Impossible. But not written in the statute itself. But even if a court was mad enough to hand out such a sentence, the revision stage would be swift and without any uncertainty.

Actually, it‘s hard to conceive of a first-time theft-offender going to prison, instead of paying a fine or at least having the prison sentence suspended.

doktrin• 8 years ago

I've probably spent a total of three to four days reading around the GDPR and I don't really see what's special about this law other than it's imposing decent standards on what was in effect a wildly unregulated industry in people's personal data

We are still waiting for the first court battles that will help determine how GDPR is actually enforced in practice. Until then being in compliance with GDPR is gonna be like herding invisible cats, and it's likely well intentioned people will get burned and OP ends up with major egg on his face within a years time. I want to drink the EU koolaid as much as the next person, but that's just naive.

cesarb• 8 years ago

We are still waiting for the first court battles that will help determine how GDPR is actually enforced in practice.

I'm wondering if this is yet another point where cultural differences are muddling the discussion. In particular, the difference between common law systems (like the USA) and civil law systems (like nearly all of the EU).

dominotw• 8 years ago

people's personal data.

I remember back in the day there was no such concept on the internet. Your identity didn't translate to anything in real world. At somepoint people started to treat it as 'real world but on the computer' instead of thinking about it totally radically new way about 'self'/'identity' ect. People thought of their internet profiles as their own self. Intenet age was killed even before it started. Endless promise of internet to free human beings was thwarted by paranoia, censorship, laws ect.

tzahola• 8 years ago

I can't help but love the turmoil GDPR is causing in the adtech "industry". Like wasps buzzing around the exterminator who's about to destroy their nest.

whataretensors4• 8 years ago

When people losing their jobs due to government overreach makes you happy, check your motivations.

seba_dos1• 8 years ago

People keeping their jobs is not the most important thing one should strive for with no regards to anything else. Especially not in tech, where it's more than likely that it won't really hurt them.

peterburkimsher• 8 years ago

Do you know a good GDPR consultant?
> Yes.
Can you tell me their email address?
> No.

tinus_hn• 8 years ago

My DPO didn’t allow me to store that kind of personal information /s

dnomad• 8 years ago

The GDPR hysteria demonstrates that:

1. Many people (even "rational hacker-types" ha-ha!) do not take the time to research, analyze or understand the regulations and laws that affect them.

2. Many people, even though they don't understand said regulations, will have an extreme negative reaction to the new regulation especially when they see big scary numbers like numbers like "$20M Euro". This is true even of regulations like the GDPR which most anybody should be able to read and understand in a couple of hours.

3. Many people don't understand where regulations come from or how they work. They have no understanding of scope, process, judegement criteria or enforcement vectors. This leads to terrifying visions of "EU cops" waiting at airports to arrest people the moment they get off the plane.

Frankly, the whole situation speaks to the profound ignorance and fear that lies at the heart of the modern nation state. Citizens do not understand the government, they have no understanding of how or why it does what it does, all they really understand is that the government can and will completely ruin them should they violate one the tens of thousands of laws and rules and regulations and decrees that modern governments impose on their domains.

This ignorance has real consequences and costs. You can see this now particularly in Britain where many people are now learning how their country actually works after voting to tear down their current regulatory and economic framework. But you can also see it in all the fear and the moaning and the teeth gnashing every time some new regulation is proposed. (The funny thing here is that even the most hardcore libertarian economists are coming to understand that regulation does not impede economic growth [1]. Indeed there's ample evidence that regulation, by imposing best practices on firms and increasing trust within the market, is a significant driver of economic growth.)

The reason I point this out on HN is because I think, at the end of the day, being an entrepreneur or an investor is all about learning how the world really works and then changing the world to work for you. And while most people can perhaps afford to plod along with all sorts of misguided notions about how the world works because their jobs do not require them to have any real understanding of the big picture, entrepeneurs and investors absolutely cannot. Buffet says it best: "Risk is not knowing what you're doing." The sites shutting down in the face of the GDPR out of fear and ignorance are making the most basic mistake, they literally do not know what they're doing.

[1] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/02/fe...

whataretensors4• 8 years ago

I'm not sure about that paper. It's based on someone's research who works at the census bureau and a university professor. They're interest is also in making their employer look good.

Also the paper ends in "we also may be mis-measuring dynamism."

pilsetnieks• 8 years ago

• The GDPR will enable anybody to be able to sue me, even from abroad
The GDPR does not have this effect, but you may be interested to know that anybody can sue you or your business for whatever reason strikes their fancy. This is a direct consequence of doing business and has nothing to do with a particular law. What the GDPR allows private individuals to do is to contact their regulators and to complain if you decide to ignore their requests.

That's not exactly correct. Art. 79 of the GDPR allows people to sue directly for violations of GDPR although it's very non-specific.

cbg011• 8 years ago

People in Europe are not extremely litigious by nature and will likely resort to calling upon their supervisory authority instead of suing directly.

What is however very interesting is article 80, which will allow a data subject to mandate a not-for-profit body to seek judicial or non-judicial remedy on his/her behalf. This will give quite a bit of power to non-profit organisations built for this purpose and will likely add quite a bit of pressure to large companies that don't comply with the law.

glogla• 8 years ago

There's no hysteria. There's just FUD disinformation campaign - businesses who make a lot of money thanks to privacy violations are very unhappy with this and they have a lot of voices.

horseLOGIC5• 8 years ago

I'm unhappy with this because now I have to do a lot of extra work verifying that I'm not breaking some law, then implement changes in both code and license agreements, then get all the users to agree.

I've had zero profit from user data so far - to the contrary. If everyone could be billed just with some cryptocurrency, totally anonymous, that would be great.

krageon7• 8 years ago

The only thing I can do as a customer is be mildly amused at the fact that you're complaining it's inconvenient for you to respect my privacy now that a law is coming into effect forcing you to do so.

From the other end of the spectrum, I know you're wildly exaggerating the difficulty of compliance.

muro• 8 years ago

I don’t want to end up being arrested for GDPR violations when I go on a holiday in Europe (yes, I really saw that one)

The US did it recently: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/dec/06/oliver-schm...

pjc5019• 8 years ago

I got into digital rights when Dmitry Sklyarov was arrested in the US for writing a PDF reader sold from Russia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Elcom_Ltd.

thrillgore• 8 years ago

And the OP articles response to this risk was to dismiss it. Great resource.

I'm gonna take the advice of my employers Law department.

Angostura5• 8 years ago

I just wanted to register my appreciation for this post, it's a breath of fresh air.

therealmarv• 8 years ago

This is no hysteria. Depending on where your company is located the sueing risk is really high. E.g. in countries like Germany there is a whole industry which lives from sueing companies and people and I can imagine that GDPR will open a whole new sueing market there. In other countries like Austria you get first warned and then sued on big GDPR violations which is a much better solution.

So it all depends.

weavie• 8 years ago

As per the article, GDPR does not enable you to sue the company.

What the GDPR allows private individuals to do is to contact their regulators and to complain if you decide to ignore their requests.

The individual will not receive a payout from a GDPR violation.

sfifs• 8 years ago

Not as per the law. The law explicitly states that option for judicial remedy exists. The article is the opinion of a lawyer based on current practice, but this is not what the law actually says.

Grollicus• 8 years ago

From a German perspective not much has changed: The core concepts "as minimal data collection as possible" & opt-in for more, the right to ask which data a company has about you and the right to make them delete it are established law in Germany since at least 2009 if not 1983.

jstanley• 8 years ago

As soon as you do business abroad you will have to comply with the laws of those countries.

But are you doing business abroad, just because you're on the internet?

Is it not the customer who is coming to you to to do their business abroad, while you do your business in the country you live in?

adventured4• 8 years ago

The author claims that local law compliance has always been the case. That is in fact incorrect and is a glaring mistake in the article. For the first 20 years of the Web's popular usage globally, you in fact mostly did not have to comply with local laws when it came to commerce online - there were few laws, and most jurisdictions had yet to flesh out how they were going to regulate and apply their laws or not. You simply opened up shop and sold to anyone from anywhere that wanted to buy from you, and you did not need to give a second thought to anything else.

Coming next is a global compliance nightmare. If you want to sell globally, you'll have to comply with dozens of unique local approaches. Small businesses won't stand a chance of being able to deal with that. An army of fee charging middle-men will spring up offering solutions, extracting fees accordingly.

BjoernKW6• 8 years ago

There's certainly no need to panic. The article doesn't address that apart from mindless hysteria there are some very real issues with GDPR. It doesn't have to of course because as the title suggests it's more about dispelling panic than about giving concrete advice.

However, many real-life problems seemingly haven't even been considered by legislative bodies. In GDPR support forums questions like these have been routinely asked in recent months and there isn't always a clear, dependable answer:

- How will I be able to operate my small company website in the future in a legally compliant manner? Some companies even consider shutting down their websites completely and - of all things - only using a Facebook page in the future. Hence, ironically we might very will see GDPR actually benefitting companies like Facebook at the detriment of small companies that consequently won't have complete ownership of their content anymore.

- How exactly does a privacy policy have to be worded so I don't get sued on day 1?

- In which way will I still be able to store address data for contacting my existing customers?

- Will I still be able to use anti-spam and security plugins for my website? These tools might store users' IP addresses, which in some jurisdictions are considered personal data.

- Can I still load resources like Google Fonts from CDNs or do I now have to host those myself?

AstralStorm3• 8 years ago

1) Respond to requests about removal of personal data, do not sell data, inform about data leaks and handle them, if outsourcing, check compliance.

2) Any item that is not legal there will be just void in court. You cannot be sued about an invalid legal policy, but only after breaking the law. The policies do not subsume law.

About the only thing you need to publish is which data is collected, how it is processed (and by whom if outsourced), for how long (if applicable) and how to remove it.

3) Uh, as usual complying to the law for PII handling?

4) Yes, if they are GDPR compliant. Make sure to put them in you privacy policy.

5) Yes, if the source is GDPR compliant.

BjoernKW6• 8 years ago

1.) That "if outsourcing, check compliance" part isn't trivial, though. Some suppliers still don't provide data processing agreements. For example, as of now it seems like I won't be able to use DocuSign for digitally signing contracts anymore because they seem to not understand what the new laws implies for them and consequently don't provide a DPA. The last time I checked competitors didn't do so either. It's good that companies have to check their processes for privacy compliance but if that disrupts a company's operations with no real remedy other than falling back to paper-based processes that's definitely a problem (admittedly in this case not one that could be solved by legislative bodies)

3.) No, unfortunately it isn't that easy. Some people - lawyers even - argue that merely someone contacting you via email or handing you a business card doesn't necessarily constitute legitimate interest on your part to process their contact data for the purpose of contacting them in the future. I disagree with that opinion but that people are even arguing about this shows that this isn't just business as usual.

5.) You could argue that this has the potential for breaking how the web has worked until now. If you now have to check for legal compliance first each time before merely linking to an external resource (because that might reveal the user's IP address) that simply doesn't scale. Linking to and drawing upon external resources arguably is what makes the web the web.

gnud2• 8 years ago

Run your small company website without gathering personal data?

No-one can sue you now, that couldn't before. I'm baffled that so many people believe this. I could complain about you to my country's regulation body. Then they could decide to audit you, and for a first offense issue a warning.

If you need the address data for marketing only, and you didn't get an explicit (opt-in) yes to receive marketing, then sorry. Get that explicit opt-in yes in the next week, or delete the data.

If you need the address data for other reasons, for example fullfilling your contract with the customer, or tax records, then keep it. But _only use it for those real reasons_. No free marketing lists. Sorry.

Storing an IP for a limited time for security reasons is fine. Have rules in place for how this data is used and when it is deleted. Don't keep it longer than nessescary.

Google seems to think you can still use Fonts. They also seem to think like they will be the data controller, and not data processor, for any user data they scoop up [1]. This seems a bit weird to me. This is the only one of your questions that I'm really not sure about. If it was me, I would just host the font locally so I was sure.

1: https://github.com/google/fonts/issues/1495#issuecomment-382...

zerostar078• 8 years ago

No-one can sue you now, that couldn't before.

That is not true, GDPR is a law, and in the past most EU countries did not have such stringent requirements. You couldn't be sued (Edit: i mean by the DPA).

halr9000• 8 years ago

I liked the aisle, but have a lot of issues with it. This is one of my main ones: IP addresses and information security. Quoting you:

Storing an IP for a limited time for security reasons is fine. Have rules in place for how this data is used and when it is deleted. Don't keep it longer than nessescary.

How long is necessary? What does limited mean? Does a regulator now get to determine what sort of algorithms I can use to protect my assets? Advanced persistent threats (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_persistent_threat) can exist over a very extended--and arbitrary time period! I'm in the security software industry, and we and our customers need to detect and react to these threats. That requires data which you simply cannot obtain an opt-in for. Sure, you put that in a posted privacy policy, but if you can only keep the data for 30 days, this means actual evidence of a crime might need to be thrown out.

ThePhysicist3• 8 years ago

I think you asked these questions before, I think most of them can be answered without much ambiguity or implementation risk:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17073857

pjc5019• 8 years ago

I think this lack of implementation clarity is definitely a problem, as it is with CE marking; the legislation sets out "principles", but there's a lot of interpretation that has to be done between those and specific real details.

Sangermaine3• 8 years ago

How will I be able to operate my small company website in the future in a legally compliant manner?

Maybe you shouldn't operate your company if you can't comply, then. The entire point of the GDPR is elevating privacy as a priority. If that means companies that can't or won't compy can't operate, so be it. People always claim to be pro-privacy, and that means putting privacy above commerce, in the same way that a restaurant that can't or won't meet safety and sanitation regulations shouldn't operate.

BjoernKW6• 8 years ago

If safety and sanitation regulations were as heavy-handed as GDPR there probably wouldn't be too many restaurants.

The point of GDPR indeed is elevating privacy as a priority. Good intent however doesn't automatically entail that the implementation has been equally good.

The EU Justice Commissioner only recently has been quoted that she herself could implement the rules required by GDPR. At the same time the European Commission's very own website isn't even remotely GDPR-compliant. That's just arrogant and condescending.

michaelsjoeberg• 8 years ago

Every company and every project or hobby ever has to be compliant with the law.

wrong.

if everyone always followed the laws, earth would still be considered flat (at least until more recently).

DanBC23• 8 years ago

and every project or hobby ever

But, in particular, that's wrong because personal projects are exempt.

sandrobfc• 8 years ago

What really annoys me about GDPR is that, given all the confusion surrounding the law, a lot of GDPR professionals are popping up everywhere.

There are a lot of people making money by providing GDPR-compliant-solutions. To avoid this, all that had to be done was to write a clear text with everything everyone had to do to be compliant, instead of pilling up some big and dubious words that no one really knows what they mean.

Concerning the law itself, it's a lot of fireworks. Give it a few months and no one will care about it again.

tobyhinloopen• 8 years ago

GDPR: Don't sell/leak/publish customer data you're fine :)

lol-lol• 8 years ago

Dont panic. Panic when you get something like this.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/nightmare-letter-subject-acce...

Bottom line, DONT store/sell/mangle with personal data of your users unless you are able to fulfill this. I was thinking a bit about having an online store:

- make login as it is on Hacker News, you dont need email

- once user has selected and payed the goods, request sending address and contact (phone/email/whatever)

- ship it, print the requested / store into cold store (it is not that hard, you do it for bitcoins, right?), delete everything except username and password (and maybe the attached goods) from server

The described process will pass the GDPR Nightmare Letter in 10 minutes (to write a general reply) that you sent to everyone requesting.

This is what traditional "physical" stores do, not the large chains, the traditional, one employee, family store. And it works.

For everything else require consent, including tracking, but think very hard if you need anything else as it will complicate your business progressively.

I really dont understand all the fuss about the GDPR, if you explain (and prove) this to ICO, I would really like to see who will punish you for that.

flatfilefan• 8 years ago

This is actually a great boilerplate for a response. Somebody should create a product that collects this information inside your company and formats it for sending it to any and every GDPR requester. End of story.

tezza• 8 years ago

this particular one has the interesting side effect of causing mass hysteria in the otherwise rational tech sector.

* Y2K

* Dot Com hysteria

* Dot Com crash hysteria

* AWS outages

* Will robots replace us ?

* Will Microsoft crush me ?

* Will Google crush me ?

* I just raised £30M series A, where my Aeron at

* Nosql means I can throw away everything I knew about databases

* Web first

* Mobile first

* XML everywhere

* OO everywhere

* Javascript everywhere

* AI everywhere

Where is the evidence for rational behaviour ?

pjc5019• 8 years ago

Y2K is one rare example where all the panic actually got the problem fixed. The dotcom crash was definitely real with huge job losses too.

horseLOGIC5• 8 years ago

I chuckled at that sentence as well. It's not that the tech sector is rational, it's that a lot of the people working in it are desperate to maintain a self-image of being a rational, scientific-minded person. Then, if some evidence collides with that self-image, we just blame it on management. Problem solved!

whataretensors4• 8 years ago

in the spirit of the good natured enforcers at the various data protection agencies in Europe

Is this serious? Why would we assume enforcers to be good natured if they benefit from fines. Or to assume they would stay good natured, even if you have the most perfect humans there now.

It's far more likely that the EU is creating tools to prevent disruption and manipulate markets. The template will likely be followed elsewhere, effectively elevating the state's data collection abilities over all other organizations.

Note, Bitcoin does not seem compatible with their laws.

depr• 8 years ago

Yes I'm sure enforcers are looking to fine Bitcoin.

whataretensors4• 8 years ago

I'm not making that argument. It's a reflection of how the law is about expanding government power without considering technology.

pawurb2• 8 years ago

https://pawelurbanek.com/gdpr-compliance-blog-rails

My take on GDPR compliance from a solo developer perspective without a legal team to back him up.

dingo_bat2• 8 years ago

IP addresses collected by Google Analytics

Why should this be your headache? It's collected by Google, not you.

pawurb2• 8 years ago

I am afraid it is not so simple. There is a thing with data collector, and data controller in GDPR I don't full understand yet. It's not like you're not responsible for data collected by services that you hook up to your application.

isbvhodnvemrwvn• 8 years ago

You are the data controller because you decided that people who visit uour site would also load GA scripts. You decide what is done with their PII. GA is just a data processor.

TekMol• 8 years ago

This is how I understand the GDPR:

    You cannot store a users personal data like IP
    or cookie id unless you have consent from the user.

I expect that nobody will comply with this.

Smaller companies seem to think GDPR is something they can fix by changing the legalese in their impressum and privacy policy. "Yet another trip to the impressum generator".

Bigger companies seem to pretend they misunderstand the GDPR. I got emails and popups from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc informing me about all kinds of nonsense about how they changed their policies and asking me all kinds of unrelated questions about what kind of ads I want to see.

Not a single company asked me for permission to store my personal data.

richmarr2• 8 years ago

You cannot store a users personal data like IP or cookie id unless you have consent from the user.

This isn't right. Consent is just one of six legal bases through which you can lawfully process data under GDPR.

https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-da...

pjc5019• 8 years ago

You cannot store a users personal data like IP or cookie id unless you have consent from the user.

This isn't true; there's a list of reasons you can keep information and "with consent" is one of them, "legitimate business need" another: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-da...

But: "However, an individual always has the right to object to processing for the purposes of direct marketing, whatever lawful basis applies."

So: you can store IP addresses as part of your information security needs, but not turn round and use them for direct marketing. (I'm not sure if web advertising counts as "direct marketing" here)

AstralStorm3• 8 years ago

Why not just not store these things at all? If you have accounts, you get to directly comply anyway. Stop being drunk on cookies.

If you're talking about tracking cookies from an ad company, you better mention them in the privacy policy.

Radim• 8 years ago

Clearly an emotional topic. The fact remains, GDPR is a well-meaning but fuzzy law, with implications that cannot be foreseen at this point in time.

To remove some of the uncertainty and automate some of the compliance steps, we built a data discovery AI tech that scans corporate data to answer:

* "Do we even store personal information?"

* "Where do we keep it?"

* "How do we make sure PII is consistently stored only in the designated places?"

This may seem trivial to a micro-business that runs on a handful of database tables, which I think is where the author is coming from. But for larger companies, even understanding what's where and why (backups? emails? cloud storages?) is a highly non-trivial—if ultimately rewarding—endeavour.

emiliobumachar• 8 years ago

Nice post.

Typo: "food safety laws" is listed twice in the bullet points for the lemonade stand.

jonathanoliver• 8 years ago

I was wondering if that was a joke, for added emphasis, or a mistake.

jacquesm18• 8 years ago

It was a mistake, thank you both, it has been fixed.

zitterbewegung• 8 years ago

Thanks for this post. I appreciate that you took the time to write this guide.

dorkusmcgavin2• 8 years ago

I personally am not hysterical about any of this, I just am concerned for the citizens of the EU while living under this law. My main issue with the GDPR is that articles and supporters are constantly thinking in terms of "business" and not in terms of other services, and also not thinking in terms of long term impact.

For instance, I run a small community website (~30 people). I receive no income, and I know everyone involved. Everyone is in the United States. Is it open to the world? Yes, technically. What happens when an EU resident signs up? Well, I'll continue to do exactly the way things are currently set up.

How does this situation play out long term? First, I'll tell whomever contacts me that I am in compliance with US law, and I'm a US citizen. I do not have to follow their laws because it's not within my jurisdiction. Second, they will order me to block EU citizens from my site, which I will not do because it's a mandate of work on me for no reason by a foreign country.

So what happens in this situation? The only recourse for the EU is the internet version of "sanctions", to block my website from the EU.

Now they've set a really interesting precedent. How do they now enforce these blocks? Technical issues aside, are they going to do a whitelist or a blacklist? Regardless, they are setting up the equivalent of the Great Firewall for the purposes of maintaining the GDPR.

So why does this matter? It's only an isolated incident that will likely never occur, right?

Wrong. One community website like mine with one EU citizen that decides to file a GDPR complaint means that somehow this situation occurs. It can even be an intentional, "sign up, file complaint" immediately to trigger this legal situation. Think there aren't any foreign governments that wouldn't flood a system like this to censor the EU citizens in various mild ways? Think some random anarchist activist will not decide to monkey with the system by finding and reporting all the small violators?

The end product is a curation of the internet for EU citizens by EU government. Hopefully your leaders are benevolent, and nothing crazy happens in the democratic process. I remember being told during the Bush and Obama administrations that my views against government surveillance due to potential for abuse were unjustified because we could never have a horrible president and that our presidents will always be benevolent, so the policy would never change toward the worse. How did that play out? How do people think democracy functions, honestly?

Again, I really don't care too much. They can self censor if they want, but it really seems like GDPR is a win for Russian and Chinese meddling.

frockington10• 8 years ago

Another thing I fear for the EU is that they will begin to lag behind. If technology forums/other interest group sites are being blocked, how will they stay current?

JTbane• 8 years ago

You make a great point. GDPR seems to be a very big headache for small hobbyist-type Internet communities.

cbg011• 8 years ago

For instance, I run a small community website (~30 people). I receive no income, and I know everyone involved

You may be able to ignore GDPR compliance in your situation, as per article 2:

This Regulation does not apply to the processing of personal data: [...] by a natural person in the course of a purely personal or household activity; [...]

There is some more information in recital 18, that says

This Regulation does not apply to the processing of personal data by a natural person in the course of a purely personal or household activity and thus with no connection to a professional or commercial activity.

So if you're not making money, and you're not established as a business you should be okay.

If you have any doubts or concerns, become compliant or ban all EU/EEA users.

magicalhippo• 8 years ago

So if you're not making money, and you're not established as a business you should be okay.

I've got a shared hosting service where I run WordPress for a blog. As such I have no direct control over the web server, nor what my hosting provider might decide to record of information, nor do I have time to audit what WordPress changes for each update.

Since I'm a programmer by trade, and my blog deals with programming, it's reasonable to assume someone might consider my blog "professional or commercial activity". Maybe I'm saved by some hard criteria defining "professional or commercial activity", but to be frank, it's not worth my time going through the entire GDPR to find that out.

As such I'm not going to take the risk of being in violation and will be shutting down my blog. Instead I'll likely be reverting to posting on Google+ or Facebook, if I bother posting more at all.

dorkusmcgavin2• 8 years ago

That's an interesting statute. The problem is it can be interpreted in many ways. Your interpretation is how some may see it, however there are others as well.

For instance:

by a natural person in the course of a purely personal or household activity

First off, this isn't purely personal nor household activity. I serve others, not myself.

and thus with no connection to a professional or commercial activity.

If the goal of the community is to help people develop professional skills (writing, for instance), couldn't that have a connection to professional activity? Also, I use this website as an example on my resume to bolster my own professional competence as a coder. That could qualify.

As always, laws are words that generally end up with the best paid lawyer's interpretations winning in court. It's a roll of the dice, that statute is not clear at all.

We're still debating the meaning of nearly all statutes in the US constitution 242 years later. Some in the legal community have declared "consensus" by case law, but even those end up getting changed and overturned all the time.

danieltillett• 8 years ago

One question that I have thought about is how are foreigners supposed to learn about the GDPR's existence? If it wasn't for the fact that I spend more time on HN that I should I would never have heard of it. I doubt there are many businesses here in Australia that know about it.

PebblesRox• 8 years ago

I first learned about it when I did a google search to figure out why I was getting so many “we’ve changed our privacy policy” emails.

cbg011• 8 years ago

I've been doing a bit of consulting work on the GDPR and for the most part small sites aren't going to have a lot of headache dealing with the GDPR requirements.

Typical, simplified, workflow (varies):

1) Review what data you collect and why

2) Document these in an updated privacy policy along with third parties you share data with and why

3) Update all forms on your site collecting personal information

4) Update your cookie policy and the way you handle cookies, for some of these you might need consent, for some there might be exemptions

5) If you expect this to be an issue, set up automated means of handling requests pertaining to data subject rights, otherwise process them as they come via email

While some smaller sites are getting around the need for an EU rep by claiming that they are only processing data occasionally and not on a large scale (whatever that means, as it's not defined by the GDPR) there is a big problem with getting an EU rep, because as opposed to a DPO, which doesn't have liability, your EU representative "should be subject to enforcement proceedings in the event of non-compliance by the controller or processor." making that natural or legal person liable, so you won't be able to easily outsource this.

If you have set up shop in the EU, then it's pretty easy to handle the aspect of an EU rep. Also, if you're transferring data between your EU and US offices/datacenters, you can self-certify under the privacy shield, starting from ~$250 per year to not have to deal with binding corporate rules or standard contractual causes, so that you can effectively make these transfers "safe" under the GDPR, along with various technical safeguards, of course.

tchock232• 8 years ago

Privacy Shield starts at $500 per year for the smallest company, and that’s before you contract with a mediator (lowest cost there is $50/year if you use the EU options). Unless I’m missing the option for $250/year on their website?

cbg011• 8 years ago

I was referring to https://www.privacyshield.gov/Program-Overview where single framework (EU-U.S.) for companies with between $0-$5 million the yearly fee is $250. If you want to add Swiss-U.S. privacy shield as well, then $375 per year for both.

gregknicholson• 8 years ago

If becoming compliant with the law will cause your business to go under that is more or less the same as saying that your business is built on gross privacy violations. So if that’s your business model then good riddance to you and your company.

Hear hear!

dingo_bat2• 8 years ago

Remember guys, while you are stressing over how to work with GDPR, Facebook literally listed all their existing data collection items and forced everyone to consent. Total increase in privacy: 0

rsj_hn• 8 years ago

People can now remove that consent whenever they want and force their data to be deleted at any time. This is a win. There are other wins, too.

MatthewWilkes• 8 years ago

My (EU) clients fall into two camps. Those who haven't had to do a single thing to be GDPR compliant because they were already following the various data protection and privacy laws, and the ones panicking.

The latter group say things like "this is ridiculous, they're making us change so much" but never have an answer to the fact that they're already violating PECR or the Data Protection Act.

zerostar078• 8 years ago

There is no need for hysteria. On the other hand many people from the EU (me included) will want to keep using HN after May 25.

nabla94• 8 years ago

The GDPR will require me to hire people and my entity is too small to be able to afford this

Q: Does my business need to appoint a Data Protection Officer (DPO)?

A: DPOs must be appointed in the case of: (a) public authorities, (b) organizations that engage in large scale systematic monitoring, or (c) organizations that engage in large scale processing of sensitive personal data (Art. 37). If your organization doesn’t fall into one of these categories, then you do not need to appoint a DPO.

source: https://www.eugdpr.org/gdpr-faqs.html

zerostar078• 8 years ago

There is a legitimate question here, where does "large scale" begin? There are a lot of similar questions that nobody can personally guarantee they know the answers for.

nabla94• 8 years ago

In the GDPR draft it was "250 employees or with 5000 records." but 5000 records was dropped.

Now it says:

http://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-5419-2016-IN...

The obligations referred to in paragraphs 1 and 2 shall not apply to an enterprise or an organisation employing fewer than 250 persons unless the processing it carries out is likely to result in a risk to the rights and freedoms of data subjects, the processing is not occasional, or the processing includes special categories of data as referred to in Article 9(1) or personal data relating to criminal convictions and offences referred to in Article 10.

Basically small firm that is just holding minimum amount of customer/user information and data and where the business model is not centered around profiling and processing user data.

flexie• 8 years ago

GDPR requires those organisations to appoint a DPO, not to hire anyone new. It's like when you designate Ben to answer the phone after 5PM, Lisa to water the plants and the last guy to leave the office to turn off the light and close the windows (and for many companies there will be a lot less work involved with being a DPO, than with switching off the lights).

pjc5019• 8 years ago

Exactly. Most businesses will already be required to have several "responsible person" roles for e.g. health and safety and fire evacuations. It's just that in a 1-person business they're all the same person.

mingodad• 8 years ago

Do what I say do not do what I do.

Today I've been asked by a library of "Junta de Anadalucia - Spain" to accept it's terms and conditions to use the wifi internet connection provided for it's users and it's a clear violation of the GDPR by a government body, basically they're asking for a blank check to do whatever they want without boring to ask/inform the user.

Translation by translate.google:

====

The Telecommunications Corporate Network of the Junta de Andalucía reserves the right to monitor and collect information while the user is connected to the Service. This information can be used at the discretion of the Telecommunications Corporate Network of the Junta de Andalucía and can even be shared with the State Security Bodies, their associates or suppliers.

Likewise, the Telecommunications Corporate Network of the Junta de Andalucía reserves the right to revise this agreement at any time.

The user must accept the General Conditions of Access each time they use the service and, it is your responsibility to review it each time the Service is accessed in case there has been any change.

The Telecommunications Corporate Network of the Junta de Andalucía, reserves the right to withdraw the Service, modify the specifications or forms of use thereof, as well as change access codes, users, passwords and other security elements necessary to access the Service . IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO THESE TERMS, INCLUDING ANY MODIFICATIONS, DO NOT ACCESS OR USE THIS SERVICE.

====

tincholio• 8 years ago

Well, presumably you can report them to the relevant regulator, then. That's the point of the law.

LaundroMat• 8 years ago

I applaud the GDPR for automatically unsubscribing me from mailing lists I bothered to take the time to unsubscribe from.

kasey_junk3• 8 years ago

This article actually points out my philosophical problem with GDPR. In one point he says you have to be compliant if you want to do business in the EU. In another he observed that it is difficult (maybe impossible) to block EU folks from coming to a web presence. It’s the expansive reach that bugs me.

I’ll note that for real businesses this is just a thought excercise, but it’s one I keep coming back to. What if some less reasonable entity attempted to regulate in this way?

drtillberg• 8 years ago

GDPR lacks clear and unambiguous limiting principles and attempts to impose costs--a tax if you will-- on what you know. From a u.s private person perspective, that looks like a significant overreach. Yes, GDPR reigns in a data industry run amok. Great. But GDPR does not clearly stop there, and for the rest of us GDPR seems to hint ominously that if you know anything about anyone, that may be a problem. So overtly cut ties with Europe or forget what you know. Are we to become know-nothings? New-age luddites? Whatever happened to liberty, representation, and the freedom to learn about the world? The commentary largely focuses on online data, ips and such, but GDPR is not limited to such things. This has the flavor of regulation written by foreign bureaucrats in consultation with big business, having little concern for the significant risk of mystifying and annoying literally anyone else in the world. It's a negative development for interconnectivity and international comity.

pjc5019• 8 years ago

This article actually points out my philosophical problem with GDPR. In one point he says you have to be compliant if you want to do business in the EU. In another he observed that it is difficult (maybe impossible) to block EU folks from coming to a web presence. It’s the expansive reach that bugs me.

Other countries have already had to deal with the US on this front. If you are a US national you may find it extremely hard to get a bank account in a non-US country, for example; non-US gambling services also have to be very careful about US users (PokerStars et al) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Scheinberg

There are also things like the Magnitsky Act and various other bits of human rights law that allow extremely serious crime and crimes against humanity to be pursued internationally.

The one we'll have to watch out for are Chinese censorship laws going global. There's already some weird side effects of "One China".

dingaling• 8 years ago

'Doing business' requires two steps:

1. Invitation to treat: that is offering services for consumption

2. Offer to contract: fulfilling the invitation by making a contract of terms

If you drop a potential customer at step 1, e.g. having your web-server decline the connection based on GeoIP, would that not constitute reasonable effort? We don't have case law regarding GDPR yet but I would certainly argue that it shows efforts being taken to exclude EU residents.

kasey_junk3• 8 years ago

I think it probably would but there are 2 major issues there (under some interpretations):

- the IP, under GDPR, is personal data. You need consent or a legitimate interest to process it.

- it is very murky regarding EU persons abroad. So if I operate with a German citizen originating in Hong Kong, I may be subject to the law.

Personally, I think that you'll be fine blocking EU IPs as long as you aren't doing anything more with them, but that doesn't change the philosophical problem.

Someone else, through proactive work on their part, came to my site (say hosted outside of the EU), even though I did not want them to and I am on the hook for a law I had no agency in creating.

Again, largely a thought exercise and not a real problem for real businesses, but it does beg the question...are websites liable for every law in the world? Do we just fall back on the 'well they can't enforce it' model of evaluating website legislation?

oblio6• 8 years ago

Are you American, by any chance? The whole internet dances to the US tune, legally.

Welcome to our world :)

adventured4• 8 years ago

For 20+ years the US - as the dominate controlling agent regarding the Internet - ensured the modern (post early 1990s) Internet remained extremely non-regulated and non-interfered with by ~195 nations (when it came to the global Internet system). It worked globally out of the gate and required no special adherence to US laws. The Chinese did not have to adopt US freedom of speech approaches to use the Internet. The Iranians or Saudis did not have to adopt US freedom of religion approaches to use the Internet. The EU did not have to adopt US legal approaches or laws to use the Internet. Any other scenario than the one the US pursued would have resulted in a fractured, mostly useless global Internet. The US was about as good of a shepherd as any nation could have ever been: thus we got several billion users onto the Internet from wildly diverse background jurisdictions. The way the US built the Internet made it possible for the EU to say: hey, we're going to do GDPR, because that works for us (and yet the Internet still works); and for other jurisdictions to say: hey, we're going to do this that or something else because that works for us.

The whole internet dances to the US tune, legally.

You've got that almost exactly backwards. The US approach has required almost no dancing at all to the US tune. That's precisely why ~4 billion people can use the Internet from 195 nations, all with dramatically varying laws. They're not adopting US law to use the Internet. That's why the Chinese have been able to implement their unique approach and still use the Internet (restricted to fit their tolerances at a government level).

You very specifically do not have to dance to US legal tunes to use the Internet. Even when it comes to IP laws, you do not have to dance to the US tune (Europe has varied widely from the US on such, eg as it relates to piracy, and yet the Internet keeps on regardless).

weehobbes5• 8 years ago

As a solo business owner based in the US, I’ve been spending the last couple weeks learning about GDPR and getting compliant. While it has not been a fun process, I do think in general the regulation is quite reasonable and overall good for the world in general. So far, GDPR compliance has not cost me any money, only time.

There are three problems however that I have with GDPR and I’d love to hear how other small non-EU businesses are dealing with this.

First is the requirement to have EU representation (Art. 27). Since I don’t have any physical presence in the EU, GDPR requires the appointment of a representative. It would appear that a new industry has been created selling non-EU businesses GDPR representation in the EU which in my brief Google searching can cost $1000 per year or more. Are other small businesses owner out there paying for this? Or how else to deal with this requirement? Not a lawyer but this is the only part of GDPR I am tempted to ignore.

Second is the common practice of using lead magnets to collect emails for marketing. My email signup forms are very clear about marketing use, and are double opt in, and subscribers can opt out with a single click. But my research suggests that this is still not GDPR compliant unless there is an explicit consent, which I believe will reduce email signup rates. Also, while Mailchimp has a GDPR form, but it is quite large and doesn’t work embedded in web page headers, sidebars or popups. I’ve only seen one of these Mailchimp GDPR signups in the wild and they opened a new browser tab to present the hosted Mailchimp GDPR form which to me isn’t ideal. How are others handling email marketing signups? Disclosure and checkbox for consent seems a reasonable compromise but I haven’t seen this very often in the wild, at least not yet, that may change come May 25. Not a lawyer but I’m tempted to keep my current forms until I see more websites make changes.

Third, I have a medium sized mailing list (less than 10,000) mostly US based emails which is important for my business. Are people running consent campaigns (as suggested by Mailchimp?) I’m concerned that I will lose a substantial part of my list due to non-response. Again, the list is double opt in and I am very reasonable with my marketing emails. (Not a lawyer) but my thought is to segment my list into EU and non-EU customers and run a consent campaign only on EU emails. Has anyone run a consent campaign and how did it work out for you?

Any thoughts or suggestions from other small and solo business owners would be much appreciated.

ryanwaggoner4• 8 years ago

I suspect you’re going to get the predictable response here that you should do the most conservative things possible, and if that tanks your optin rates and email list and ultimately your business, then obviously you’re a filthy scammer and your business deserved to die.

The lead magnet thing is such a good example. It’s a clear and voluntary trade-off: you can have this free resource if you join my list, from which you can unsubscribe at any point. It can obviously be done in a scammy way, but you’re clearly not doing that. But some people think you should have to provide that resource without any restriction.

Or that forcing people who already opted in to do so again is fair, because if they don’t reconfirm, then they must not have wanted to be on the list. This is like a SaaS company calling every customer periodically to ask them if they might want to cancel.

It makes no sense, but the pro-GDPR crowd on HN in particular is very hostile to marketing in general and email marketing in particular.

No one here who likes the GDPR gives a shit about your business. They’ll be happy to give you bad advice based on how they wish the world was, and if it costs you dearly, that’s not their problem and you probably deserved it anyway.

I’m doing some of the same activities as you, and I personally will be changing basically nothing for GDPR. I’ve always treated customers fairly and I’ll continue to do so. Governments that have no jurisdiction or enforcement mechanisms against my company can pound sand.

weehobbes5• 8 years ago

Thanks for your feedback. I have heard from some of my friends who also run small businesses that they also plan to do nothing. I think for a purely practical perspective, it's extremely unlikely that EU regulators will go small software, app or web businesses in the US – I'm sure they have bigger fish to fry. That is, unless the small business does abuse their customers data and privacy resulting in a large number of complaints to EU regulators. Still, I think almost all of GDPR is pretty reasonable and not very costly (time or money) to implement (at least to me).

merijnv• 8 years ago

My email signup forms are very clear about marketing use, and are double opt in, and subscribers can opt out with a single click. But my research suggests that this is still not GDPR compliant unless there is an explicit consent, which I believe will reduce email signup rates.

But if it required user activity to register for those lists AND you explicitly identified them as for marketing purposes, that seems like you already HAVE consent? I mean, what do you imagine consent to mean other than "an active affirmation from the user that they're ok with this". If it's indeed double opt-in AND clearly communicated, it seems you clear that bar by a mile?

weehobbes5• 8 years ago

I'm not a lawyer, but my interpretation of GDPR and the research I've done suggests that my current lead magnet approach (which is at least in the US very common) gives me consent to use the email for delivering the lead magnet, but not for marketing unless there is an explicit opt in for subsequent marketing emails. I think (and I have read) that not getting the user to explicitly check a box for marketing emails is implicit consent and is not allowed under GDPR. Also, saying something like "you cannot sign up for getting this lead magnet unless you consent to marketing emails" is also not allowed. That said, I agree with you that I'm very clear. So maybe I and others are interpreting GDPR too strictly. Here is one article that takes GDPR very strictly: https://kerstinmartin.com/blog/gdpr-lead-magnets

I just found another article however with another solution which may be better. The article suggests instead of saying "Get this free ebook! And p.s. we will send you information and marketing emails about our product." you should say "Sign up for our newsletter to receive information and marketing emails about our product. Also we will send you a free e-book as a gift." It's not as good of a call-to-action, but changing the order does turn into explicit consent for marketing. Source: https://blog.mailrelay.com/en/2017/12/28/new-gdpr#_What_abou...

mychael2• 8 years ago

has not cost me any money, only time

It sounds like you don't value your time. In my universe (software development), time is money.

weehobbes5• 8 years ago

No, I definitely value my time. I actually (and maybe strangely) have appreciated the opportunity to review my data processes, privacy policies and security. I think my business is better for it. Also, getting compliant is mostly a one-time effort with little maintenance, whereas paying $1000+ every year for a EU representation service that will in reality probably do absolutely nothing is very irritating to me.

That said, your point is still fair. I sometimes spend my time less-than-optimally because it feels "free."

mjewtoo• 8 years ago

First of IANAL, I'm a European citizen within IT that has to deal with GDPR in my professional role. I believe there is a lot of hysteria and FUD around GDPR. Anyway, this is how I would handle your problems.

1. In the same article[1] that you reference, the following paragraph might apply to your business: >27.2 The obligation laid down in paragraph 1 of this Article shall not apply to: >processing which is occasional, does not include, on a large scale, processing of special categories of data as referred to in Article 9(1) I would ignore it for now. If any supervising authorities would contact you regarding compliance issues, talk to an expert.

2. This is if you use Consent as the legal basis for collecting the data. I have seen a few business use 6.1.f [2] (legitimate interests) as their legal basis, which has other issues like the weight test of interests not being tested in court, yet. The Article 29 Data Protection Working Party have released opinions on how 'legitimate interests' should be used [3]. However, there are other laws about marketing that could apply on a country per country basis. If you select the consent route, a double opt in with possibility to opt out at anytime that should be sufficient as long as you document the text for the opt-in's and record it together with the date&time of the opt-in. Oh, and you don't make the consent conditional on getting your goods/services. I can recommend the Article 29 WP guidelines on consent[4] for extended reading. It sounds like your current process is enough or requires very little tweaking, I would keep it as is.

3. I have not run a consent campaign. I have run information campaigns about our users rights with links to required documentation and they have been appreciated. I would not run a consent campaign as I believe your consent should be good enough based on the process mentioned above.

Hope this helps! - [1] https://gdpr-info.eu/art-27-gdpr/ [2] https://gdpr-info.eu/art-6-gdpr/ [3] http://ec.europa.eu/justice/article-29/documentation/opinion... [4] https://iapp.org/media/pdf/resource_center/20180416_Article2...

weehobbes5• 8 years ago

Thanks mjewtoo, I appreciate the feedback.

Re #1: To be exempt you must fit all 3 criteria: 1. processing is occasional 2. does not include, on a large scale, processing of special categories of data (e.g. religious, political, criminal backgrounds, sexual orientation, etc.) AND 3. unlikely to result in a risk to the rights and freedoms of natural persons I collect a number of emails on my website and apps every day, so I don't think my processing is "occasional". If I collected emails once a year or even once a month, sure I could argue that processing is occasional. But collecting 10-20 email signups per days doesn't seem occasional to me.

2. Thanks for this opinion on this. I think I agree your assessment.

3. Again, I think I agree with you - thanks for you opinion.

Very helpful, thanks!

Boulth6• 8 years ago

Provided your company doesn't specifically target its services at individuals in the EU, it is not subject to the rules of the GDPR.

Source: https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection/refo...

raverbashing5• 8 years ago

Thank you (the author) for this.

commenterx• 8 years ago

I'm a EU citizen and proud of EU actually, something I don't feel very often btw, for being in the forefront in law-making that protects the privacy of individuals.

My vocabulary has been enriched with a new word: PII. I like it. It simplifies when thinking about GDPR. I expect one or two years from now I'll know the important parts of GDPR like the back of my hand.

But right now every person in the world running a multinational company needs to understand a new piece of legislature that threatens 4% of their annual revenue. You have better things to do and so I understand everyone's anger.

But is it wrong to force business-runners to learn about GDPR, stuff that's pretty close to human rights, like "don't track any of my PII without telling me exactly what you plan to do with it"? Is it wrong to now have to learn this, as a web/app developer?

I'm sooooo sick of being tracked. It has definitely made me exit the social media world all together, six months ago. Even though it is detrimental to my career I even asked Linkedin to erase my data. I truly hope my career isn't screwed just because I refused to give Microsoft a detailed description of 30% of my person, my whole work life that they can connect to an email address (some people even give them their phone number), IP, tracking cookie, thus a Facebook profile, real or shadow, thus to the most detailed graph of PII there is, probably in the whole universe. Hopefully in the whole universe otherwise civilizations on other planets took a wrong step somewhere.

I hope GDPR leads to PII being treated as gold by the market because it's so rare. Because isnt' it better to skip all this tracking-business that having to deal withstuff like GDPR?

No cookies for me please. Ans I'm also sick of having to run javascript.

ryanwaggoner4• 8 years ago

I think much of this probably comes down to cultural and ideological differences between the US and the EU. It certainly seems that almost all of the rabidly pro-GDPR crowd is from the EU.

Interesting: I have a number of anti-GDPR comments here and on last night’s GDPR thread that got upvotes last night US-time, heavily downvoted throughout the night, and are now going back up :)

oblio6• 8 years ago

It certainly seems that almost all of the rabidly pro-GDPR crowd is from the EU.

Hey, from my viewpoint the rabidly anti-GDPR crowd is from the US :p

skummetmaelk5• 8 years ago

Yeah what a surprise?

Imagine a global paparazzi law banning photos of celebrities from being published without explicit consent.

Celebrities would be happy. Paparazzis and magazine readers not so much.

frockington10• 8 years ago

America innovates, the EU regulates. It's been the story for decades now and there will always be a naturaul tension between innovators and regulators

krageon7• 8 years ago

Yes, because being against a law that is both reasonable and the right thing to do doesn't make any sense when you're a real live human being. The hysteria about businesses imploding under legislation is classic internet outrage at a phenomenon not very well understood. If you actually took the time to read the source material, you could very see that it's reasonable and made to protect you. At the same time, you would see that there will not be any world-ending fines handed out for literally no reason (on a slight tangent I don't understand why it is so impossible to grasp that this isn't something that happens in the EU).

ryanwaggoner4• 8 years ago

This is a law with good intent that was very poorly written and is very ambiguous. Most of the people with your view posting here aren’t experts in this regulation or the law in general, but just armchair lawyers who scanned this regulation and like the intent so they argue that it’s simple.

Ironically, if you asked 10 different people with that position about basic facts about this law, you’d all have different answers. Maybe if it’s so simple you could all take a few mins to get your story straight on how it works?

tannhaeuser• 8 years ago

Does anybody know if it's required to remove CDN links (such for Google fonts, cdnjs, etc.) and host all assets locally instead unless consent is given? Assets from CDNs are required for a site to function; what's not required is to send `Referer:` so maybe it's sufficient to set a referrer-policy.

domakidis• 8 years ago

I wonder the same. Would I need the web visitor's consent for loading a reCaptcha to verify they're indeed human?

Google fonts is just one of the many font libraries. For example, most web font licenses at myfonts.com don't permit webmasters to self host them. Bypassing the HTTP referer download protection, downloading them and then self hosting the font files could lead to significant legal problems.

spacenick882• 8 years ago

I don't think it's really that simple. especially the deletion requirements. There are just so many IT systems that really don't support deletion. An absolute worst case I can imagine is GitHub being asked to delete an account which had commits in multiple large projects. Are they going to alter those projects source code?

madeofpalk2• 8 years ago

This is already a “solved problem” though. If you post copyrighted material to Github, Github will have to remove it.

If you’re posting users information to a public repo, then you fully deserve whatever impacts you’ll face when you have to delete it.

spacenick882• 8 years ago

I'm not talking about copyrighted or otherwise shady stuff pushed to GitHub. My concern is what's supposed to happen when a GitHub user requests GitHub to delete their entire account and all the personally identifying information they have on them. Clearly GDPR calls for this to be possible, yet that would mean that GitHub would have to delete this user's commits (which usually contain full names and mail addresses). Clearly they can't reasonably do that though.

aeorgnoieang3• 8 years ago

If you’re posting users information to a public repo

Like their name and email address in every commit they submit?

I've already seen a notice from GitLab requiring me to consent to waive my rights to have that info deleted if, e.g. I were to contribute to the GitLab open source project. But I'm not sure that that's even enough for GDPR.

grigjd32• 8 years ago

Whatever one thinks about the subject matter, the writing in this piece is awful. You can get the substance of what the writer is saying by skipping 90% of the content. Moreover, the tone is talking down at the audience - unless that audience is already excited about gdpr. This comes across as not being interested in convincing anyone but in cheerleading their position.

eleitl• 8 years ago

It ain't hysteria if you're in Germany, and a private individual or a nonprofit (e.V.). Due to specialities of German law third parties can serve you legal writs for hundreds or thousands of EURos.

Which is why I'm shutting down these 20 domains running HTTP/SMTP services I'm hosting in less than a week, and wait until the smoke clears.

DanBC23• 8 years ago

GDPR doesn't apply to personal projects unless those are commercial projects.

aeorgnoieang3• 8 years ago

I've read contradictory claims. Another commenter mentioned changes to their personal blog to be compliant.

acejam• 8 years ago

Do you have a source for this?

gomox• 8 years ago

Can you point me to a more detailed source on this issue? I have heard Germans concerned about getting sued by third parties for minor website legalese issues.

I'm not fluent in German so I wasn't able to fully understand the situation.

losvedir3• 8 years ago

As someone more on the hysterical side, good post, thanks. Can you clarify one part for me? Take this bullet:

The GDPR is going to expose me to fines of up to 20 million Euros for even the slightest transgression
No, the GDPR has the potential to escalate to those levels but in the spirit of the good natured enforcers at the various data protection agencies in Europe they will first warn you with a notice that you are not in compliance with the law, give you some period of time to become compliant and will - if you ignore them - fine you. That fine will be proportional to the transgression. You can of course ignore the fine and then ‘all bets are off’ but if you pay the fine and become compliant you can consider the matter closed.

What if you get warned and decide at that point to just shut the site/app/business/project down?

Or is it the case that once you begin operating under the GDPR era, you'll have to handle those "good natured" enforcement warnings, delete data, etc?

I get that I'm probably compliant, and probably wouldn't have any complaints against me. I just don't know if it's worth waiting it out to see if there's an issue, or if now is my only chance to easily not deal with it by just blocking EU users.

losvedir3• 8 years ago

It's like if a new law were introduced requiring a license in order to ride a bike, to make sure people don't hit pedestrians or bike dangerously in the road. The license is free, it just takes a weekend to go take a written test and demonstrate that you can safely ride a bike. Some people who would pass but can't be bothered to give up a weekend would instead choose to just stop biking. It's an unavoidable consequence of introducing a friction where there wasn't one, and there's no way to carefully target or wordsmith the requirement so that this doesn't happen.

I think people miss that there is a very large qualitative difference between "no law" and "law". Even a very carefully targeted law will still have the effect, on the margin, of preventing or stopping compliant activities. But in the case of something like privacy, or control of data about you, maybe that's worth it in order to stop the noncompliant activities.

On a non-hypothetical topic: does anyone have a good resource on the requirements with regard to backups? That's one of the larger technical sticking points for me - do we have to delete from our backups as well on such a request?

Tomte3• 8 years ago

That‘s all true, but quite boring, isn‘t it?

Because the reverse also hold: if we remove the need for driver‘s licenses for cars, more people will be able to drive.

The fallacy is IMO that many people always consider the status quo ante as the perfect balance. Because we have gotten used to driver‘s licenses.

So the argument that new regulation stifles some non-harmful behaviour is a truism, but doesn‘t really contribute anything, unless it comes with numbers.

myWindoonn2• 8 years ago

It's not like that at all; some of us are small business owners who don't have to take any action, because we already were not mishandling PII and already had a PII-handling section in our data-handling policy.

mbrumlow3• 8 years ago

I can tell you that GDPR is going to cause issues with block based backups. Many hosting providers don't separate customers on different block devices. When you back up a block device you have snapshots that have many different organizations data on them.

Part of making good backups is knowing that the backup can't change. The only solution now is to add paths to go back and modify those backups to remove customer data when asked too.

That is my plight anyways.

highesttide• 8 years ago

I've seen a lot of people talk about having a separate table for ids that should be removed when you restore a backup. It seems like a plan pretty viable solution, at least from what I've seen.

icedchai5• 8 years ago

The solution is to keep a list of "things to exclude" if a backup is ever restored. This is reasonable. Rewriting old backups is not reasonable.

badwolf2• 8 years ago

Would such a list not by nature consist of PII?

acdha5• 8 years ago

The conventional solution to that problem I’ve heard for the last couple decades is to use encryption so the backup doesn’t need to be altered ahead of your normal rotation schedule as long as you can probably drop a customer’s key on demand.

mbrumlow3• 8 years ago

The backups are encrypted, but the there is no way for the backup software to know one client's data from the other. Its block based, so all it sees is a volume.

Post hosting providers, or anybody really don't create new volumes for each customer. They would simply have a directory per client. Onces you start needing to know more about the file system then you sort of waste all the benefits block based backups provide.

By block based I mean volume based, were we simply copy the allocated blocks of the file system that changed between each backup.

megaman22• 8 years ago

Constantly trying to whitewash over the fact that GPDR is a huge pain in the ass and will involve a lot of work for a lot of companies is what I don't understand, but Mr. Mattheij has been doing it for months, so that's evidently very important to him for some reason.

It's chewed up a few weeks of active development time putting in features for purging and exporting anything that looks like it might be personal information, plus a considerable magnitude more hemming and hawing and trying to figure out if, how and to what extent the regulations apply to us, and how the customers that we sell our products interpret the regulations and what features they require for their interpretation of compliance. It's a big headache, especially where we are also dealing in industries that have conflicting data retention requirements.

If we didn't have EU-based customers with sufficient sales to justify the effort, there are a thousand and one other things that we could have better spent that time and energy on.

nhf• 8 years ago

One might argue that your company doing the "custodial" data work over the past few weeks and building in the mechanisms in order to handle that data in a more nuanced way is something that should have been done beforehand, and that the fact that you had to take time out to look at it means the law is doing exactly what its drafters wanted it to do.

jonathanyc• 8 years ago

Oh man, the rest of us are so sorry that you are now required to responsibly handle personal information.

To quote the author:

Then automate it. If you could automate the collection of the data in the first place then you definitely can automate the rest of the life cycle. There is no technical hurdle companies won’t jump through if it gets them juicy bits of data but as soon as the data needs to be removed we’re suddenly back in the stone age and some artisan with a chisel and hammer will have to jump into action to delete the records and this will take decades for even a small website. Such arguments are not made in good faith and in general make the person making them look pretty silly after all nobody ever complained about collecting data, in fact there are whole armies of programmers working hard to scrape data from public websites which is a lot more work than properly dealing with the life cycle of that data after it has been collected. So yes, it is a burden, no, the burden isn’t huge unless you expressly make it so but that’s your problem.

sunir2• 8 years ago

I am happy the author is fighting the power. However since most of us live in society we generally would prefer less chaos.

The difference between investment to collect data and investment to protect dat is there is no ROI for compliance (in any compliance domain) so the capital is not easily available.

Instead of punishing companies for existing in the universe and subject to the laws of thermodynamics, the most effective compliance regimes help transition companies proactively to lower the pain which will lower the cost to GDP and thereby angst from human beings.

The GDPR body won’t even answer basic questions like whether IP addresses need to be retained or not because of the competing requirement of the EU security directive.

They have had 23 years too to prepare for this change. And they own the privacy directives. You’d expect them to be better prepared themselves. But they are being kind of arrogant and unhelpful. I suspect because they know they did not make a perfect law and they will figure it out in case law later. This capriciousness is also super annoying.

snom3803• 8 years ago

I don't think he whitewashes that it's a burden. But he does try to address some of the panic and hysteria.

I care about privacy. Perhaps Mattheij does as well, and that's why this is important to him. If you agree with the spirit of the legislation, then I think you should also consider this a great opportunity to do the right thing, instead of a hassle.

georgebarnett• 8 years ago

Of course there are 1001 things YOU deem more important. All that says to me is that your interests and priorities are not aligned with how people in the EU want their data handled.

The WHOLE POINT of GDPR is that many companies have continually pushed PII data handling down their list of priorities. As a result, the EU has decided to step in and use a law to bring it back up the list.

hartator11• 8 years ago

The GDPR is going to expose me to fines of up to 20 million Euros for even the slightest transgression No, the GDPR has the potential to escalate to those levels but in spirit

So, yes, but maybe no?

hartator11• 8 years ago

The EU regulators see their job as ensuring compliance, not as creating a source of income.

I thought one of the objective of EU is to make US social media pay their fair share. Citing same article:

European holdings or that use the EU to avoid paying taxes rightly worry about this particular aspect

So, what is it?

donatj• 8 years ago

Where is the form on this site that claims to be GDPR compliant to get my IP removed from the server logs?

acdha5• 8 years ago

Keep reading the rest of that paragraph:

Well, this website is fully compliant with the law, so at least in this particular case it seems to work. Why? Because I don’t store any information about you. That’s a conscious choice on my part which I made long before the GDPR was even talked about in public. But if your situation is more complex then you too can be compliant, or at least - and this is key - you could try to be compliant. For instance, one oft heard argument is that no webserver (or even any internet service) is going be able to be compliant because all web servers log IP addresses, and IP addresses are PII. But that argument does not hold water. There are several reasons for that, the major ones being: webservers only log IP addresses if you configure them to do so. Almost all webservers have a formatting option that determines what exactly is logged and you could configure your webserver to not log the whole address but just the network portion. You also have the option to log the address and to disclose that you do so in your privacy policy, but then you will have to allow for the removal of that data on request, which you may find burdensome (or not, that depends on the volume of such requests). Finally, you may have a legitimate reason to log the IP address, provided you delete it after you are done with whatever use you collected it for in the first place. There is enough room in the GDPR to hold on to the address for 30 days with a possible extension of another 60 days after which an automated reply to the user can tell them their IP address was purged and you’d be in compliance. That’s one of the reasons why I think the GDPR is a surprisingly good law, most of the times when legislation is written that impacts technology the end result is absolutely unworkable, in this case most scenarios seem to work well for all parties involved.

apple4ever13• 8 years ago

But I should be able to hold on to IP addresses for as long as I want, since they aren’t PII.

taysic5• 8 years ago

Ok but we have to trust this person that they don't store IP information. There is no way of knowing for sure. And there is no obvious way to detect a lie on this.

frockington10• 8 years ago

Anyone know if it is easy to block any user from the EU in AWS? It's been determined that Google Analytics has a greater value than Europe.

hartator11• 8 years ago

As soon as you do business abroad you will have to comply with the laws of those countries.

Serving a webpage is not doing business though.

hartator11• 8 years ago

There are several reasons for that, the major ones being: webservers only log IP addresses if you configure them to do so.

That’s not true. Apache and Nginx default logs IPs. Maybe OP should check his Nginx logs.

frockington10• 8 years ago

What is stopping competitors from burying each other in legal work? Just start commenting names and addresses on various pages and submit complaints

SomeGermanGuy6• 8 years ago

What does competitors stop doing that now? No business is 100% compliant in any law. If they want they can just for the sake of it bury you in legal work already.

See Google vs Oracle. Apple vs Google.

caffeine51502• 8 years ago

I'm an attorney who's spent the last year or so working on GDPR compliance for a US SaaS provider some of whose clients have EU employees. My understanding is that it's true that EU enforcement is more in the spirit of "how can we get you compliant?" before doling out fines (vs. the US where it can be more "let's make an example of this company by hitting them with a big fine" and scaring others into compliance). I also agree that the authorities aren't going to be handing out 7 figure fines like candy, both because it's not their historical approach and because they don't have the resources to fight too many of those battles. I want to say I read that the Irish authority's annual budget is around $9M. Theirs is higher than most and Ireland is where most of the US tech giants are established due to tax laws. That said, I think to say that GDPR compliance is simple because it's text is fairly readable or that EU data protection law is simply a matter of transparently respecting people's personal data and not being a bad actor as to privacy is an overstatement. For example, the ePrivacy Directive, most known for prompting all those cookie consent banners, can be incredibly complex to comply with. Each member state has implemented that Directive in different ways. Look at this example https://ico.org.uk/media/action-weve-taken/mpns/2013732/mpn-... where Honda sent out emails to its 350k database simply trying to confirm continued interest in being on their list and got a 13k euro fine for their troubles. I don't know all the facts, but from the document, it doesn't appear that Honda got the fine because they were recalcitrant or being terrible actors. And if the fine is proportionate to the offense (not to the size of the violator), then 13k euro might be levied against a small company for whom it is a significant penalty (not to mention costs, legal fees, etc. in dealing with it).

charleslmunger• 8 years ago

The Honda case actually seems pretty reasonable to fine - Honda had an issue where consent from dealer events and other sources wasn't correctly recorded. So they have a large list of emails, where consent falls into three categories:

* Person did not consent, they left the form blank

* Person consented, but it was not recorded

* Person actively denied consent ( wrote "no")

Honda then sent commercial email to this set of users, to "confirm" their preferences. In my view, that's not reasonable - if I leave a "would you like to receive email" item in a form blank, that is not permission to send me email.

mindslight• 8 years ago

Also 13k/350k is 4 pence per email, which is tiny! Well below what they'd have had to pay if pay-to-be-received had been workable.

I'm not a fan of government or of fines, but this amount isn't even a slap on the wrist.

GordonS• 8 years ago

From the PDF you linked to:

"This e-mail was sent to those individuals on the database where no “opt in” or “opt out” information was held"

Sounds like they were basically on a fishing expedition - if the individuals hadn't explicitly opted in, Honda shouldn't be sending them emails.

caffeine51502• 8 years ago

Agreed that the fine for a company like Honda appears very reasonable. My only point is that their behavior was more sloppy than malicious or 'terrible' - and sloppy in a way that many, many companies are sloppy. And this size fine for a small company would be very painful - maybe fatal.

hartator11• 8 years ago

So if that’s your business model then good riddance to you and your company.

That’s the best way to ensure EU will never have a decent startup scene.

mychael2• 8 years ago

I'm a citizen of the United States, which is a sovereign nation.

I will never pay the EU "internet transgression fees", no matter how well intentioned they are. Full Stop.

AndrewKemendo• 8 years ago

GDPR puts into jeopardy the business model that almost every consumer internet business has run on, post internet bubble: advertising.

That's what is at jeopardy here and nobody is willing to just say it.

Don't agree with the concept of tracking users to serve them ads? Great, make the case that GDPR ends the scourge of advertising subsidized applications as services.

Let's not ignore it though. The reality is, a lot of internet companies that consumers use and like, rely on either selling advertisers access to their market or sell user contact data outright, because there is no other way to make money.

If the argument is that this is an unethical and harmful way to keep services alive then we need to agree that the bulk of the last 20 years of startups business models are broken and what the implications for future internet business models are.

SomeGermanGuy6• 8 years ago

we need to agree that the bulk of the last 20 years of startups business models are broken

I agree.

If a startup is build on selling my data, I am more willing to pay a fee then to have them sell my data.

If we could go back to WhatsApp having a fee instead of Facebook using and selling my (meta)data, I would switch anytime. If Telegram starts raising a fee for using their messenger without anybody reading my messenges/location/... I am all in.

vbezhenar2• 8 years ago

How can I be non-compliant with GDPR? If I could care less about it, is it enough for me to do nothing? Should I expect that European users should find out themselves that they my website is not GDPR-compliant? Or I must actively ban EU IPs?

cbg011• 8 years ago

If you actively choose not to pursue compliance, you should make it clear in your own privacy policy that the site is not for use by EU/EEA citizens and also use IP geolocation to block their requests.

_rpd• 8 years ago

You should require users to positively certify that they are not EU/EEA citizens, and refuse service if they are. Blocking by IP is a good idea but not sufficient.

vbezhenar2• 8 years ago

It seems that it's easier to comply for small projects :) Thanks.

bowlofpetunias• 8 years ago

This is what pisses me off the most about all the hysteria and whining:

"The law has been in effect for over two years at this point, and the DPD, the European Data Protection Directive has been in effect for over two decades. So no, this law was not sprung on anybody, though it is very well possible that you only became aware of it a few weeks or months (or days?) ago. If that’s the case do not panic, you too will most likely be fine."

Nevermind the fact that the underlying privacy laws are much older, and so many practices were already essentially illegal but went unchallenged so far.

aeorgnoieang3• 8 years ago

> The law has been in effect for over two years at this point

So what's this whole thing that's going to happen soon? It's going into double effect or something?

SomeGermanGuy6• 8 years ago

The law was made public two years ago, to give companies time to get compliant. It actually goes into effect next friday.

SomeGermanGuy6• 8 years ago

Because nobody gave a duck, because there was no fine (or they were laughable).

Now that we have a single law for a 500 million customer market with a substantial fine, things start to shift to the better.

robotdan• 8 years ago

For a lighter take on a Friday, read how Site-Lokd™ brewery technology solves GDPR crisis: https://www.inversoft.com/blog/2018/05/16/site-lokd-brewery-...

Enjoy.

chx• 8 years ago

This in no way should be read as you, the small business operator will face a fine of 20 million for each and every infraction that could be found.

Thank you, random stranger on the Internet! However, that is not the law. And even if you are right? As I posted yesterday, half of the employers in the USA has 1-4 employees and make $387,200 on average yearly. Even if they get fined to 1% of the maximum, they are completely wiped out. So no, it's not hysteria, it's plain business sense for them to slap an IP ban on it and move on.

yani• 8 years ago

GDPR is a beautiful thing.

andrewla2• 8 years ago

I find this confusing:

Note that the 20 million Euros or 4% of global turnover is the maximum fine, the specific language is ‘a fine up to €20 million or up to 4% of the annual worldwide turnover of the preceding financial year in case of an enterprise, whichever is greater’, so that’s the maximum of the fine that’s being set by the 20 million or the 4%, and this bit is there to ensure that even the likes of Facebook and Google will not simply ignore the law and pay the fine to be able to continue as they have so far. This in no way should be read as you, the small business operator will face a fine of 20 million for each and every infraction that could be found.

Saying that this is intended to be aimed at the Facebooks and Googles is all well and good, but that's covered by the "4%" criterion. The €20 million figure is aimed at companies that have a global turnover of less than €500M, not the Googles and Facebooks. That's why it's scary.

Reedx• 8 years ago

"Add filters keeping out children"

What are some methods for doing this? (aside from asking for birthdate, which is far from fool proof)

marichards• 8 years ago

Not sure what "it will ensure that the public will not be able to use the GDPR to harass businesses" as GDPR explicitly empowers individuals to seek compensation. https://gdpr-info.eu/art-82-gdpr/

thisismyusernam• 8 years ago

You missed a key question here. As a business owner, what on earth do I need to do next?? Do I need to email all my users giving them an opt-out option?!

jacquesm18• 8 years ago

Working on that, there will be a second installment on Monday and - possibly, if I can find the time - a third with a number of case studies.

This whole sequence was sparked through a discussion about the GDPR on HN a few weeks ago and I've been working on it off-and-on hoping to get it done before the law becomes enforceable.

mark_l_watson• 8 years ago

I spent two hours today at our campsite working on my web sites to make them reasonably compliant. One problem area is that I serve my blog on Google Blogger. With pained reluctance I turned off comments and stopped showing my followers. I also linked to Google’s own GDPR info page. I used to use Jekyll and maybe I should go back to doing that.

Any suggestions?

adambrenecki• 8 years ago

... it may not be possible for you to lock Europeans out reliably enough...

Here's a fun little example of this: If one of your parents was a British citizen, then you're a British citizen 'by descent'—not merely eligible to become a British citizen after you fill out a form, you're an automatic British citizen by default unless you renounce your citizenship. (This has caught out at least one member of the Australian parliament, where dual citizens aren't allowed to serve.) This means that you can have someone who's an EU citizen (for the time being, at least), who doesn't live in the EU, has never set foot on EU soil, and maybe isn't even aware that they're an EU citizen themselves.

jacquesm18• 8 years ago

Your example is interesting but the fact that it is such a remote edge case means that if such a person were to raise an issue with their local DPA they will find that no such institution exists so you are safe to ignore that situation for all intents and purposes. Even so it would be common courtesy to honor a removal, update or insight request from that individual as well as from all other individuals that your service caters to.

davidcd• 8 years ago

Hi thanks for his very interesting,

What I think is a big problem this stuff about requiring consent. This is a big issue at the moment for website owners and app developers who have on line advertising from vendors such as Google (Admob/Adsense) and use e.g. Google Analytics for development support. These guys do not record individual user details and have no interest in doing so.

Specifically for such people there is an issue where personalised advertising (according to to Google and others) needs an opt in, fine but for app developers and web site owners they don't have any user details other that maybe ip address so if they put up a pop-up and record consent how do they know who the user is if they don’t have any other users info.

This is leading to absurd discussions re for example Google Analytics used by millions of websites and apps. There is something called client id which GA uses to identify unique "users” or website visitors. Now apparently as it is unique this is personal data so should require consent according to some experts I have read. But as it anonymous how can it be identified who it “is”. If a user demands to know what data a website/app has and mentions the client id info well who knows for sure what any client id represents in the real world ?

More to the point what is the likely legal/financial consequence if a user claims that the website id did not ask for consent for this client id to be recorded (how would they be able to prove which one it was that was theirs anyway) ?

Would they be able to sue ? I presume not. So is the IC going to be interested in this apparent breach ? And if the developer/website owner had a data breach where they GA account was compromised would they have to inform all the Client ID individuals ? Again obviously not but you see how these discussions are going !

GDPR: Don't Panic

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