GDPR After One Year

https://truthonthemarket.com/2019/05/24/gdpr-after-one-year-costs-and-unintended-consequences/

by goerz • 7 years ago

285 402 7 years ago

Virtuoso• 7 years ago

Can GDPR be used to actually destroy a company operating online in the EU? I'm guessing it could be, by simply overwhelming them with valid requests under GDPR, like "Give me all my data!"

Bjartr• 7 years ago

I would hope that under such an intentional deluge, the court would accept that the reasonable turnaround time for requests would increase substantially.

chmod775• 7 years ago

You can automate this - easily in most cases.

gerbilly• 7 years ago

Well maybe the companies should make it easy to extracts and delete people's data?

SV is full of people telling themselves how smart they are, and they can't come up with something as simple as this?

anonymousab• 7 years ago

Since the goal is merely compliance with the spirit of the law, the courts likely wouldn't hammer down a company for having issues when trying to legitimately and fully comply with the law.

bqqyz• 7 years ago

If you can't locate my data and send me a copy and/or delete it then you don't deserve to be in business.

It's as if you had a parking business and couldn't locate my car.

DanBC5• 7 years ago

by simply overwhelming them with valid requests under GDPR,

Doesn't work in the UK because the request has to be genuine and not vexatious.

https://2040infolawblog.com/2019/05/19/a-cure-for-blindness/

The relevant text in the final version (Article 12.5) is as follows:
Where requests from a data subject are manifestly unfounded or excessive, in particular because of their repetitive character, the controller may either:
(a) charge a reasonable fee taking into account the administrative costs of providing the information or communication or taking the action requested; or
(b) refuse to act on the request

Dylan16807• 7 years ago

Also they have 30 days to respond, so at most you can force them to grab your data every 3-4 weeks even without that clause.

simion3142• 7 years ago

You should then implement an automatic process. But why a large number of your users would start asking for their data at once? Maybe you did something wrong and they want to move elsewhere and in this cage you would like to keep them hostage?

anotheryou• 7 years ago

And does it really protect much? As long as you sign an agreement with the 3rd party that they value GDPR you are all golden, no?

dcbadacd2• 7 years ago

Can be revoked at any time as well as request all the data they've aquired about you and it's deletion.

scrollaway• 7 years ago

It's not just for protection but also for control, which gdpr excels at. I am able to retain full control over where my data goes, who is allowed to have it, I can make sure it's deleted when I don't want it there, and I can actually request to have it.

WA4• 7 years ago

I‘m not so sure about that. Sure, in theory this works, but if your data was shared with thousands of companies, how do you know it really was deleted? Furthermore, GDPR still has the thing that businesses are allowed to have a legitimate reason for keeping your data.

So far, as an end user, the GDPR doesn’t feel like anything changed at all. Facebook and Google still gather shitloads of data with zero control on my side. Cookie warnings on every website and loaded with dark patterns (link leads to link, leads to link, leads to link, leads to server timeout). I simply accept these popups and trust uBlock Origin to actually block the whole AdTech shenanigans, instead of relying on their popup bullshit.

DanBC5• 7 years ago

As long as you sign an agreement with the 3rd party that they value GDPR you are all golden, no?

No. Consent isn't always required, and consent alone isn't sufficient for all purposes.

duxup• 7 years ago

I like the philosophy behind GDPR.

I just think it misunderstands how people actually behave.

Human behavior is always a challenge for any regulation. These are early days for digital age regulations, even the best efforts will be hit or miss at best I think.

LaGrange3• 7 years ago

..Amazon not doing due diligence ain't a GDPR problem. The only problem is that those two values are way too low:

* €55,955,871 in fines

* €50 million of which was a single fine on Google

Those are a joke. Considering what's going on, those values should be orders of magnitude higher.

WA4• 7 years ago

Especially in the light of:

"89,271 data breach notifications"

Very odd.

cobookman• 7 years ago

Sounds like Google is being unfairly targeted due to its success & cash reserves.

NeedMoreTea3• 7 years ago

Nothing to do with their size and number of users impacted then?

criley22• 7 years ago

Those are a joke. Considering what's going on, those values should be orders of magnitude higher.

Frankly, I think higher fines and more aggressive fining would even further deepen the business moat that mega businesses are already developing over small and medium.

The article already describes how the current regulatory regime boosted Google and big players 20-40% directly at the cost of small and medium (not in the top 100 or top 50) sites.

Frankly, I think European countries should just take the China approach and ban American companies because there isn't going to be a regulatory structure that works here, and they're only going to hurt their domestic competition by playing this stupid game.

seanmcdirmid2• 7 years ago

China doesn’t ban American companies for that reason, they ban them because political dissidents could use them to communicate privately (gmail) or publicly (YouTube Facebook twitter....). Not all American companies are banned, either.

mola3• 7 years ago

The business moat is irrelevant. It should be handled with anti trust regulations and not at the expanse of pro privacy.

LaGrange3• 7 years ago

Frankly, I think higher fines and more aggressive fining would even further deepen the business moat that mega businesses are already developing over small and medium.

You can always charge small companies more than the big ones. Also: witness my world's tiniest violin.

And yes, if that doesn't help, absofuckinglutely block them.

dimitar• 7 years ago

Exactly, apparently the average amount fines is fairly low. The maximum fine is 4% of revenue or 20 million euros (whichever is bigger). 4% of Google's 2018 revenue would be almost 5 billion euros (with a B). Google could have had it much worse.

return16• 7 years ago

most of the companies being fined are EU businesses / shops. europe doesn't have many big successful tech companies.

di4na2• 7 years ago

This is not a joke, because the European Agencies believe in teaching and learning more than in punishing. What they want is compliance, not making money.

They will give you warning and time to fix it more than fine you. A fine is solution of last resort, after you burned them and proved you can not be reformed.

skybrian3• 7 years ago

It seems like a biased list, but it's good that someone is collecting links about these incidents.

Operyl• 7 years ago

It seems like there’s things from both sides of the camp on first glance, can you point out the bias you see? (Legitimate question, and I only quickly glanced.)

CyanBird• 7 years ago

At least from what I read, it is the slant of the entire piece than anything in particular. If we removed environmental protections we would also see a boom of growth in the industry, but we decided that those benefits don't outweigh the environmental cost, same here with GDPR, after Cambridge analytica using digital micro targeting to heavily manipulate populations and elections it is simply too high a cost to pay for what is otherwise a pretty shifty industry otherwise

I'd heavily recommend everyone here to read the book surveillance capitalism it is an incredible explanation of what goes behind the curtain

In short, GDPR has some relatively minor problems and externalities and blogger wants to scrap the entire GDPR because of them....

skybrian3• 7 years ago

I'm judging by "Compliance costs are astronomical" when the supporting evidence is largely estimates from before it went into effect.

So you can't take everything too seriously, but still, it's good to collect more links. Also, the author is being clear about the weakness of some of the supporting evidence.

WA4• 7 years ago

This is a very interesting list, especially the part about the GDPR increasing the attack surface and where the data gravity center is.

The part about "compliance cost" should be taken with a grain of salt. If you were compliant before, because you respected the users‘ privacy, the effort was relatively low.

The study about VC having dropped by 50% in the EU because of the GDPR sounds pretty weird to me. Unless of course there’s selection bias and we’re talking AdTech companies mostly.

An interesting number would be: how many people closed down forums and moved their discussion boards to Facebook?

defertoreptar• 7 years ago

If you were compliant before, because you respected the users‘ privacy, the effort was relatively low.

Why? Don't you still have to build systems to be able to comply with user requests in a timely matter?

WA4• 7 years ago

First, if you cared about user privacy, you would store as few data points as possible.

Second, it’s very likely that you have APIs in place that can request all data for a user anyways. If you don’t know what data you have of your users, you don’t give a shit about their privacy, no?

Third, user requests are usually: a) what data do you store about me? B) Export all data. C) delete all my data (for real).

dmoy• 7 years ago

The study about VC having dropped by 50% in the EU because of the GDPR sounds pretty weird to me. Unless of course there’s selection bias and we’re talking AdTech companies mostly.

Could just be noise in the data?

Could be VCs determining that fewer products are actually worth pursuing if the main monetization model for everything is ads?

I dunno.

rootusrootus5• 7 years ago

One thing my company did (we are US-based, but have an international operation as well) to try and mitigate the volume of compliance work to be done was section off software that would be used in the EU from everything else. Previously we had been working on making all of our software 100% internationally universal, but GDPR made that difficult, going forward we're kinda cutting loose the guys in the UK (there's some irony, I guess) to keep up the code that has to be GDPR compliant while the rest of the company focuses elsewhere.

So... anecdotally, I'm not at all surprised if the increased compliance cost made some people reconsider investments in EU businesses, even if they don't rely on ad revenue as a business model.

rootusrootus5• 7 years ago

I don't know about it being low effort to be compliant. We spent most of a year with a significant portion of our software engineering teams devoting time to GDPR even though we are not any kind of data collection company. It's the legal requirements -- we had to audit every last piece of software, make little tweaks if necessary, etc, just to ensure we were demonstrably compliant with the law.

I wouldn't be surprised if 150B is actually a low estimate.

looeee2• 7 years ago

even though we are not any kind of data collection company

Are you collecting data on your customers? If you are, then one of the things your company does is data collection, even if that's not what's in your business plan.

tomatotomato37• 7 years ago

The problem I think is happening with the compliance cost/VC stuff is that it's also tainted by the other internet junk (Article 13) that the EU passed soon after when they started doing this whole internet regulatory push.

fromMars12• 7 years ago

Anecdotally, I thought that many companies just decided to exit the European market because the costs of GDPR were so high.

icelancer• 7 years ago

We did. We shut down our SaaS product in the EU and have no plans to reinstate it.

friedman235• 7 years ago

The study about VC having dropped by 50% in the EU because of the GDPR sounds pretty weird to me. Unless of course there’s selection bias and we’re talking AdTech companies mostly.

It's really that surprising to you that when the EU effectively bans one of the most profitable models of business that venture capital investment will drop by 50% in the EU?

To be fair, it's probably just not GDPR but all of these regulations combined. Venture capital can move across borders, why would you invest in a startup in the EU when you could just do it in the US?

JumpCrisscross5• 7 years ago

If you were compliant before, because you respected the users‘ privacy, the effort was relatively low

This is not true. Even if you are perfectly compliant, you need a complaint-response mechanism and lawyers in the EU ready to react to invalid accusations.

Given GDPR took a complain-investigate model, one also needs to be ready for power-tripping regulators. (Recall the Romanian data protector using GDPR to seize sources from a newspaper investigating corruption allegations [1].). Protecting against that requires, if not active lobbying, keeping lobbying connections warm. That costs money.

Ironically (and predictably), I’m seen more data being funnelled to Google than before. They have the scale to deal with this crap in each of the EU’s (currently) twenty-right member states.

[1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20181114/01491541047/yet-a...

Quanttek6• 7 years ago

Given GDPR took a complain-investigate model

Ironically, when GDPR came into effect so many on HN were spreading fake news that companies would be litigated to death by users. Of course, to remove that possibility and ensure only legitimate claims are pursued, the data regulation authorities act as middle-man. Such cases of abuse could also just as easily be done when people could sue. For example, nowhere does the GDPR imply that you need to hand-over a source - that goes for journalists as well as non-journalists. Companies sued have the right to appeal and, if GDPR wouldn't have existed, the Romanian authorities would've probably just used e.g. tax law to stifle the RISE project.

jdietrich5• 7 years ago

GDPR is just the 1995 Data Protection Directive with teeth. If you were compliant with the DPD, you were almost certainly compliant with the DPD by default. The principles are the same and many parts of the legislation were carried over verbatim. GDPR came as a shock only because many businesses had been flagrantly disregarding the (weakly enforced) DPD for many years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Directive

Even if you are perfectly compliant, you need a complaint-response mechanism and lawyers in the EU ready to react to invalid accusations.

Did American businesses really think that they were immune from prosecution under EU law prior to GDPR? No European business was under any illusions about the extraterritorial reach of American courts.

xwdv2• 7 years ago

Unintended consequence: because children are under the custody of their parents until they become adults, a parent could easily go in and demand the entire history of data a company collected from their child be provided; a gross violation of their right to privacy which some argue doesn’t even exist anyway.

drawnwren3• 7 years ago

Do people believe that children have a right to privacy from their parents?

xwdv2• 7 years ago

Not sure, if you are raising a child and they are hiding information or data from you that could be detrimental to their development or may imply intent of hurting or maiming others do you have a right to know about it so you can take action?

Could even be nasty in a case where separated parents have 50/50 custody and one parent uses GDPR to get data on what another parent might be doing with their child and build a case against them.

failbuffer• 7 years ago

Not per se, no. But there are many overbearing/controlling parents out there. It's easy to imagine scenarios where parental access to GDPR data could be a bad thing (and yet other scenarios where it could be a good thing).

balfirevic• 7 years ago

I sure believe that they should have it to some degree, depending on age.

DanBC5• 7 years ago

Yes, of course. Imagine a father who rapes his child and abuses his wife. The child is removed from the father by the mother who goes into hiding, but with temporary legal approval.

We don't want the father (who likely retains some element of parental responsbility until the court case has finished) to be able to get the child's location by SARs.

In Europe children are humans and humans have rights. Children are not the property of their parents.

rootusrootus5• 7 years ago

As a parent, yes. It's a gradient that starts at "no" when they are an infant to "yes, just like any other adult" when they turn 18. My kids are elementary age and I definitely respect their increasing right to privacy, even from me.

smnrchrds• 7 years ago

This is the centre of a hot button issue in Alberta, Canada's politics. The previous provincial government passed a bill that prohibited schools and teachers from telling parents that their child had joined a GSA [0]. The new conservative government decided to change that aspect of the legislation and controversy ensued. Many believe that this change would put LGBT children at risk [1][2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay%E2%80%93straight_alliance

[1] https://globalnews.ca/news/5102167/alberta-election-gsa-rall...

[2] https://edmontonjournal.com/news/politics/ucp-education-plat...

mola3• 7 years ago

No that's the unintended consequences of collecting data in the first place.

NewsAware• 7 years ago

The article vaguely links Cambridge Analytics to GDPR. Is there really a connection or is the article merely trying to frame GDPR negatively by comparing?

captainbland• 7 years ago

I don't think so. The APIs that Cambridge Analytica were taking advantage of were available long before GDPR became enforceable and are most likely illegal under GDPR because they allowed third parties access to your personal information without your consent - where it was a friend of yours who consented to revealing their information, Facebook would also reveal some information about you.

The Wikipedia article actually details all this quite well in the fourth paragraph (obviously without reference to GDPR): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica

tschellenbach2• 7 years ago

Cambridge Analytics is a data portability exploit. It leveraged your friend's ability to send your Facebook data to third party apps. GDPR enforces more data portability, which in some sense allows for a larger attack surface for such exploits. The article mentions one example of hackers extracting all your personal data after a takeover of your account.

phiresky2• 7 years ago

Framing a law that forces companies to allow you to export your own personal data in a readable format to reduce vendor lock in as "this will definitely cause the next Cambridge Analytics!" on the basis of "but user authentication might be bad!" is absolutely laughable and the fact that this article got so popular here is pretty discouraging.

jaabe5• 7 years ago

I think we went in the wrong direction in terms of public data. It really isn’t in my best interest as a citizen that our public sector can’t use my data to run more effective, spot health issues sooner or perform city planning based on citizen-mobility rather than educated guesses.

I think it’s absolutely the right direction for private companies though. I know, I know, a lot of you are distrustful of government, but I’m Danish and we generally trust our public sector in to an extend that would truly surprise a lot of you.

So with that out of the way, I think it’s a shame that we spend so much public funding burying public data in silos. I think we should absolutely keep citizen data safe, but I think we should also use it and perhaps work to make some of it less sensitive. Because some of it frankly doesn’t have to be sensitive.

In my country we have a social security number. You get it 1-5 minutes after you’re born, and in the olden days, it was used to identify you when you wanted to do things like open a bank account. It’s still used for that to some extend, but in the meantime we’ve created this thing called NemID (soon to be mitID), which is a national 2-factor secure digital identity, that we use to enter online agreements because it turned out that your social security number wasn’t actually safe. We’ve also had leaks and hacks exposing nearly half of the current social security numbers over the past 25 years.

Because a social security number is deemed sensitive by the GDPR, we’re spending hundred of millions on the bureaucracy around it. It’s by far the most reported thing to our national data protection agency, I think almost 80% of the public cases involve it. And it makes no sense.

Why the hell didn’t we make it illegal to use it as an identifying number instead? It would have saved us so much money.

And that’s just one issue with the GDPR. Another is machine learning and data. This is obviously a sensitive area. I don’t personally think we should troll through citizen cases to try and find possible alcoholics. Maybe someday, but society has to deem it morally acceptable first.

I do think we should use citizen data to schedule shifts though. It makes no sense to me, to have 10 nurses and 15 teachers do full time scheduling in a city of 60,000-100,000 citizens when an algorithm can do it instead. But we can’t, because the GDPR prevents us from using data that way.

I like the GDPR, but I think it needs a revision for the modern public sector, and I think we should really ask ourselves what we want with our data.

Do we want to spend trillions on a bureaucracy guarding it, or do we want to demystify some of it and put it to good use, so we can spend the trillions on nurses, teachers and better infrastructure?

/disclaimer I work in the public sector.

return16• 7 years ago

I’m European, I trust my government

I think it would help to state your nationality, European governments range widely in trust levels from west to east, and there are a lot of governments in there. I wouldn't trust the greek government for a second.

[An example: the social security number (which is given to every doctor/pharmacy/etc) contains verbatim the date of birth and sex of the citizen, and this has been deemed lawful]

rootusrootus5• 7 years ago

Guessing Denmark, since OP mentioned NemID.

tyfon• 7 years ago

I'm Norwegian and I also trust the government in most cases.

But I agree there are several European governments I would not trust.

afiori12• 7 years ago

the social security number [..] contains verbatim the date of birth and sex (and city of birth) of the citizen

Italy does that, as I understand it is meant to be easier to remember and it was created in a time where thing were very different. I agree that it poses issues now, but at least it makes clear that the code is not supposed to be a password.

di4na2• 7 years ago

GDPR does not affect public data. At all.

jaabe5• 7 years ago

People like to say that, but it does. Each member state has had to adopt the GDPR into their national legal system, it’s true that it’s called various things. In Denmark where I’m from we call it Persondataloven, but for all intends and purposes it’s GDPR.

I did mean public sector data though.

njharman2• 7 years ago

So the guy getting his public court records removed doesn’t exist?

detaro9• 7 years ago

I do think we should use citizen data to schedule shifts though. It makes no sense to me, to have 10 nurses and 15 teachers do full time scheduling in a city of 60,000-100,000 citizens when an algorithm can do it instead. But we can’t, because the GDPR prevents us from using data that way.

Can you give more details on that case?

jaabe5• 7 years ago

Making sure the right staff gets to the right citizens at the right time is a massive undertaking. It’s where 60-80% of our staff works. We have something like 1200 teachers out of 7000 employees for instance.

It’s also an area that’s subject to a lot of requires/shared resources. I mean, you have the regular schedule which takes up a lot of time on its own because you need to find replacements when someone is missing. If I get sick, no one really cares that we go a day without an Enterprise Architect, but if a teacher goes sick, multiple classes will need an replacement. Then there is the irregular stuff like rehabilitation, special school events or a range of things.

Basically it’s so complicated that it takes up the time of several full time positions.

It’s not the kind of complicated that’s not solvable by ML though. Our neighbouring municipality did a PoC on it, and I’m not sure how the procured the rights use the data for it (they probably didn’t), and it turned out that they could automate almost all of the planning and scheduling. Humans still had to make decisions, but it would suggest available resources or alternative schedules making the process much smoother.

That’s a lot of nurses and teachers you could actually put to work, nursing or teaching if it works.

It works by knowing what resources are needed though, and in the case of rehabilitation that involves knowing that someone needs anti-suicidal therapy at 10 am at a certain address. Which is extremely sensitive data, that the algorithm isn’t allowed to access under our adoption of the GDPR.

luckylion• 7 years ago

Maybe someday, but society has to deem it morally acceptable first.

Err, please let's not make individual freedom dependent on what society finds morally acceptable.

I’m European, I trust my government in a way many Americans simply won’t understand.

I am as well, and I don't trust my state + federal government. Not to the extent that it seems common in the US, and in slightly different ways, but I certainly want my government to have as little data on me as possible.

Even if you do trust your current administration, imagine that the most extreme party of whichever political side you consider crazy & generally wrong wins with a landslide next month and has all that stuff available that you figured you can trust your government to have.

jaabe5• 7 years ago

Do you trust your government more than Microsoft?

That’s what I meant to say, but I should certainly have voiced what I meant better.

simion3142• 7 years ago

I think we went in the wrong direction in terms of public data.

Aren't all the complaints from private companies? You can't use say FB data to do some nice thing for the society because FB will not give it to you even before GDPR , maybe they give you some secret access if you pat them a lot of money. The API access is super limited.

BeniBoy• 7 years ago

"GDPR has been the death knell for small and medium-sized businesses [...] Here is a partial list: [...] Unroll.me, inbox management app"

Don't know for the other companies, but for this one, good riddance, they had a notoriously scummy business model[1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/24/technology/personal-data-...

tormeh• 7 years ago

Also Klout was shit. The negatives of social media magnified to parodic heights.

https://xkcd.com/1057/

nindalf• 7 years ago

Exactly. Unroll.me continues to operate outside the EU and continues to sell access to people's emails. "We don't charge you for this amazing service" they claim, at no point making it clear what their business model is. They prey on the ignorance of consumers, exactly what regulations (like GDPR) should be protecting consumers against.

I suppose a similar article could be published about the pharmaceutical industry, crying about the cost and consequences of FDA regulation. Doesn't mean we should scrap FDA regulation and "let consumers decide" whether drugs are safe or not.

hannasanarion3• 7 years ago

Every single company on that list deserved to die.

LaGrange3• 7 years ago

"GDPR has made it so that only large multinationals can steal your personal data :["

daxterspeed• 7 years ago

Each item on the list deserves a little blurb on why GDPR "forced" it's removal from the EU market.

Examples: Unroll.me's entire business model was made illegal in the EU.

Hitman: Absolution faced problems in taking ownership of its EU servers.

The two games Loadout and Super Monday Night Combat both claimed not having the resources necessary to comply with GDPR. For perspective Loadout had a peak of 208 concurrent players in 2018[0] while SMNC had a peak of 40 players in 2018[1].

[0] https://steamcharts.com/app/208090 [1] https://steamcharts.com/app/104700

hn_throwaway_99• 7 years ago

What's wrong with Pottery Barn?

starik363• 7 years ago

That is a straight up dumb thing to say.

Care to explain why "Brent Ozar, IT consulting services" (first company on the list) deserves to die?

BrentOzar3• 7 years ago

Every single company on that list deserved to die.

Hi, I'm Brent Ozar, the cofounder of the first company in the list. (Ah, the joys of alphabetical sorting.)

I've written a big long post[1] about why we stopped selling to the EU, but here's the short story: the EU only represented 5% of our revenue, and for that small of revenue, I wasn't prepared to risk the GDPR's fines if any one of the third party tools we use had a problem.

During our GDPR prep with our attorneys, it was completely clear that the third party app ecosystem was in no way ready for GDPR enforcement actions. For example, we use WordPress and WooCommerce to sell online training classes. I'm a database administrator, and I know dang well that WP and WC aren't encrypting student data at rest, nor do they encrypt the other fields where people put student data - let alone how some of the plugins handle student data by storing it in the posts table, which was never designed to handle that kind of thing. If I had to face EU officials, I could never say with a straight face, "Oh yes, I was completely confident in WordPress's abilities to keep customer data secure."

I have confidence that someday, apps like WP and WC will have a better GDPR compliance story that doesn't just meet the bare letter of the law, but also the spirit. When they do, I'll be all about selling to the EU.

I'm doing the preparations that I can - for example, we've got a Privacy Policy that lays out our interactions with other partners, and lets EU folks request their data & delete it.

However, this is just the life of a small bootstrapped business: sometimes, you gotta make choices to focus on your best customers. 5% of my customers were threatening me with regulatory action that might result in huge fines if I let a ball drop. Unfortunately, I only have so many hours in the day. If I have the choice between doing regulatory paperwork for 5% of my customers, versus adding more value for 95% of my customers, I gotta make the obvious choice.

[1] https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2017/12/gdpr-stopped-selli...

x0x0• 7 years ago

Drawbridge: cross device matching (ie fingerprinting) service

unroll.me: selling your inbox contents, but "anonymized"

FamilyTreeDNA: proudly letting law enforcement and probably tons of others search your (and your relatives!) DNA, without -- for your convenience -- asking your, or your relatives', consent

Klout: kinda scummy, and also not phased out because of GDPR

Lithium CEO Pete Hess reported that Klout is a “a standalone consumer-facing service” that no longer fits the focus of delivering customer service solutions. In addition, “recent discussions on data privacy and GDPR are further expediting our plans to phase out the Klout service, giving us a chance to lead on some of the issues that are of critical importance to our customers: data privacy, consumer choice and compliance.” [1]

We're supposed to mourn these companies? We shouldn't trust an author or site whose best choices of companies to mourn are (1) at least in some cases, not gone because of GDPR, and (2) mostly companies we're better off without.

[1] https://www.relevance.com/lithium-ends-klout-gdpr/

mola3• 7 years ago

Yes, an economy based on deception that uses it's customers in unknown ways, most of the time in ways entirely unrelated to the product, is failing after appropriate regulation.

All consequences seem entirely acceptable.

Businesses must act with responsibility for society. the regulator is usually lax, until all hell break loose.

OskarS• 7 years ago

Couldn't agree more. It's a biased presentation of the facts, and could easily be reframed. Take "compliance costs are astronomic", for instance, could just as easily be rephrased "Companies spend more money than ever to ensure the safety of customer data". I know that's certainly the case where I work: it's been a massive amount of work, but it's great for our customers. If it weren't for GDPR, I am certain that management wouldn't have allowed us to do it.

Cleaning up a shitty system is expensive, and there are bumps in the road. It's still worth doing.

jchw6• 7 years ago

“Since 2016, newspapers in Belgium and Italy have removed articles from their archives under [GDPR]. Google was also ordered last year to stop listing some search results, including information from 2014 about a Dutch doctor who The Guardian reported was suspended for poor care of a patient.”
All consequences seem entirely acceptable.

...I am not sure I agree with your worldview.

anoncake21• 7 years ago

It's impossible to judge whether those articles should have been removed without knowing their content and context.

Removing the article about a doctor being suspended for poor care is perfectly reasonable if he was later cleared of wrongdoing.

detaro9• 7 years ago

including information from 2014 about a Dutch doctor who The Guardian reported was suspended for poor care of a patient.

FWIW, according to the Guardian article they reference, that case was not about getting the fact that the doctor was investigated and temporary suspended (that's public record), but a website taking such records and publishing a "blacklist of doctors unfit to treat patients". It's more a libel-like case than a privacy one.

"The judge said that while the information on the website with reference to the failings of the doctor in 2014 was correct, the pejorative name of the blacklist site suggested she was unfit to treat people, and that was not supported by the disciplinary panel’s findings.

The court further rejected Google’s claim that most people would have difficulty in finding the relevant information on the medical board’s Big-register, where the records are publicly held."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/21/dutch-sur...

jasonkester• 7 years ago

Those businesses seem to all be doing fine. They just implemented one of those annoying pop ups that you have to agree to before you can see their site, and they’re still doing all the same things with your data. But with your “permission” now.

All the other businesses, though, the ones who were never planning to do anything bad with your data. Those ones still all had to do a bunch of work and show that same stupid notice that drives their customers away. And they’re a lot less able to defend themselves against the mean spirited user behaviour outlined in the article.

And for added fun, the eu now knows that it can pass silly laws like this as often as it likes, and the whole software world will need to devote a team to do a full sprint implementing another piece of user hostile code that doesn’t help their business.

I’m not a fan.

raverbashing2• 7 years ago

though, the ones who were never planning to do anything bad with your data. Those ones still all had to do a bunch of work and show that same stupid notice

If they're not planning to do anything bad with the data (that is, only use the data for what they need to work with the customer) they don't have to show the notice. It's that simple. RTFR

lone-commenter2• 7 years ago

another piece of user hostile code that doesn’t help their business.

That's entirely their problem. Compliance with the law wouldn't require user-hostile "code" (I think you meant UI) if the business model wasn't user-hostile in the first place. It wouldn't hurt their business if their business was reasonable.

dmitriid3• 7 years ago

The vast majority of those pop-up notices are not GDPR-compliant, JFYI. I really do hope the law enforcement comes after them.

return16• 7 years ago

Digital advertising grew by 17% in 2018 according to IAB / PwC report

TeMPOraL8• 7 years ago

This could be a lagging indicator. Let's see how much it grows in 2019.

csense• 7 years ago

My question is, if you're a US startup, and you simply ignore GDPR requests, what happens?

Does Europe have some way to require its ISP's to firewall you off or blackhole your DNS? Can they force Amazon to shut off your AWS account? Do your executives risk being taken away in handcuffs to a European jail when they go to Europe on vacation?

If there are no consequences, why don't US tech companies just completely ignore it? (Of course, big players like Google probably have EU-based datacenters and other assets that could be seized to pay their fines. I'm thinking of small, cloud-hosted startups whose employees, bank accounts and physical assets are all on US soil.)

ronsor• 7 years ago

You could probably get tangled if you accept money from EU citizens. If you don't take money from them (or use cryptocurrency), the EU can't really do anything.

anoncake21• 7 years ago

Does Europe have some way to require its ISP's to firewall you off or blackhole your DNS?

Not in a systematic EU-wide way. Courts sometimes force individual ISPs to blackhole websites used for copyright infringement.

I guess if your company ignores the GDPR, it's treated as an illegal organization. So you may still be able to provide your service in the EU, but people cannot legally pay you, including paying you for ads.

microcolonel• 7 years ago

If you're only moving packets, you generally have nothing to fear until the EU develops into an empire, at which point there's a good chance that they will have a mandatory firewall mechanism (some members already do impose firewall rules on ISPs through the courts, AFAIK).

If you have no business in the EU, generally the worst they'll do is censor your website.

wongarsu• 7 years ago

If there are no consequences, why don't US tech companies just completely ignore it?

Once you grow big enough the EU will inevitably have leverage over you: Servers rented in the EU to lower latency, payment streams from EU customers, offices in the EU to get talent, subsidiaries created for tax reasons, executives on vacation, employees on conferences, money spent on advertising, etc.

If you are a startup in SV the EU migh not have much direct pressure it can apply, but how would an investor react when given the choice of "we could spend some more money now, or we could do nothing and be significantly limited once we grow to a certain size, basically unable to do anything significant in one of the largest economies of the world".

ralfn• 7 years ago

Not to mention that avoiding GRPR, laws that shouldn't need to have been written in the first place, is like walking around with a big sign 'we are evil and not to be trusted'. Because if you are to be trusted, a simple cursory check would simply affirm you are already within the GDPR.

We work in the b2b in the financial sector and part of our contracts in Europe is that all of the data is hosted in infrastructure that complies with the GDPR. That could be Google or Amazon, but not Slack or any SV startup.

JumpCrisscross5• 7 years ago

how would an investor react when given the choice of "we could spend some more money now, or we could do nothing and be significantly limited once we grow to a certain size, basically unable to do anything significant in one of the largest economies of the world"

The simplest solution would be ignore GDPR, dominate the American market (which is easier to scale across than the EU), and then use that momentum to launch a simplified version in Europe. (Or buy a competitor.) The scale advantage will almost always outweigh being prepared for multi-market growth from the beginning.

unilynx2• 7 years ago

Or they'll block payment processors from transferring money from EU customers to you

It's hard to imagine what a startup would be doing that makes them interesting enough for the EU to notice and want to levy fines, yet be completely out of reach.

davidgh• 7 years ago

If you are a US-based startup and don’t sell to EU customers, then I guess it doesn’t really matter if you attempt to comply.

However, most US SaaS-type startups very much want access to EU markets. Ignoring GDPR won’t matter until it does, and then when it does, it will matter very much. For example, you grow and want go establish a presence in the EU, investors with EU ties may be hesitant to get involved, a potential acquisition is ruined because the buyer has an EU presence and isn’t willing to take on the historical liability.

Yes, there’s a lot in GDPR. If you’re a startup that is making money by selling user data, the cost of compliance will be quite high. But if you are selling an actual product or service that generates revenue by collecting fees from your users, compliance is probably not as hard as you think. And building your startup with user data protection in mind, you’ll find it can be something you use as a selling point.

With more than a year of history, it’s not hard to find easy-to-digest articles that put GDPR in terms that an average person can understand. Integrate those principles and processes into your business, document what you’re doing, and then stick to it. Even without a huge compliance budget - if you do that and nothing else - you’ll be in a much better position than to just ignore it, even if you don’t fear punishment.

raverbashing2• 7 years ago

GDPR enforcement is through the corresponding data protection offices of the different countries and fines issued by them (now if you don't pay the fines and completely ignore the offices that might be an issue that's escalated)

Some people are making it sound like the EU Cyber police is going to hack your services or parachute and kick their way into your office in SV because a user in Slovenia didn't get their data portability request on time, which is not what is going to happen.

nihonde4• 7 years ago

No B2C tech company can avoid doing business involving EU member state or UK citizens. You have to assume you’re in-scope unless you have zero contacts with Europe.

afarrell• 7 years ago

I thought it was EU/UK residents, rather than citizens. Even if all of your users are US citizens, some US citizens reside in Europe.

fmajid• 7 years ago

GDPR set the terms of the debate as model regulation, and is inspiring similar legislation elsewhere. California's CCPA is largely similar to GDPR. Tech companies are lobbying in committee to neuter it, but it's not a foregone conclusion. Thus as a startup you should incorporate it in your architecture and roadmap, even if you do not execute on it right away.

Also your US clients may be subject to GDPR and pass it on to you transitively as they are required to do for subcontractors or IT services vendors.

tomhallett• 7 years ago

If a US company wants to do business with another company (partenship, approved vendor, platform marketplace, or even having them as a B2B customer) that other company may require them to be GDPR complaint.

njharman2• 7 years ago

I never understood how anyone thinks being forgotten is a right. Wrong, false, liable, limited set of privacy related information should be correctable, removable. But facts about you and what you’ve done, no. I’m sorry you made embarrassing mistake. But it’s not worth losing so much public information and enabling bad actors to save yourself from your own actions.

fromMars12• 7 years ago

Agree, and it doesn't even exist in most domains. I can't expunge my school transcripts or information from credit bureaus.

Do we really think a society where there is no public information about people better?

Nursie• 7 years ago

Credit bureau information tends to expire off the record over time doesn't it?

izacus2• 7 years ago

Which country in Europe are you from that school transcripts are public?

lewis10282823• 7 years ago

You can, any bankruptcy information expires after 7? years, and school records aren't public.

llukas• 7 years ago

Sometimes only "mistake" you do is to be born into wrong minority.

Also in lot of countries punishment is more of a corrective action not revenge. This means even convicted criminals have right to hide convivtion after some time.

arendtio• 7 years ago

Well, I think it is a bit more complicated. Humans typically do not remember as good as machines. So the intention is probably to bring the internet experience closer to the real-life experience. And the GDPR doesn't seem to make a difference between embarrassing Youtube videos and simple facts about what someone did (would probably take decades in court to make such a distinction).

Nevertheless, it seems, the real problem isn't the impossibility of achieving such a 'delete-from-the-internet' mechanism, but rather the low value for average people and the high value for deceitful individuals.

I mean, I like having a legal right to make Google/Facebook/E Corp delete all the data they have about me and my usage, but there will be few occasions when I will make use of that right and even fewer for people who don't even care what they share online. Imposters, on the other hand, will find that right most valuable.

izacus2• 7 years ago

European correction system doesn't believe in turning each small crime into a life sentence of marginalization and punishment. Which is why we don't have to lock up a huge chunk of population into cages for life - letting people resume their lives after serving their punishment significantly reduces the amount of returning convicts and makes society a safer place.

Barrin922• 7 years ago

I never understood how anyone thinks being forgotten is a right. Wrong, false, liable, limited set of privacy related information should be correctable, removable

It becomes a right when enough people in a democratic society want it to be one, it's that simple. People in Europe believe that the right of individuals to control information about themselves and to not be stigmatized for actions in the past is to be valued higher than public access to it.

I perceive the US attitude simply as a sort of voyeurism. We already know it well from celebrity culture where people's entire lives are picked apart and put on a platter for the public to drool over, I have no interest of seeing it expanded to everyone, so I'm thankful for legislation to give me at least some control over information about me.

The biggest beneficiaries of this might very well be children who have had their entire lives put on the net by their parents without even having the slightest say in it.

Fellshard• 7 years ago

Only under post-modern, fully secular humanist conceptions of rights.

logicchains2• 7 years ago

It becomes a right when enough people in a democratic society want it to be one, it's that simple.

That's not what a right is; a right is something that some logical/philosophical moral argument has detetermined people should have, regardless of what other people think. That is the whole point of rights in the US constitution: to protect people against the government and the "tyrrany of the majority". Otherwise you could call something like "the right of the German people to have no Jews within one kilometre nearby" a right if the majority voted on it, and the term loses all meaning.

phiresky2• 7 years ago

Wrong, false, liable, limited set of privacy related information should be correctable, removable

Which is exactly what the law is for.

The examples in the article were deceptively reported. For example, the doctor who asked The Guardian to take down articles about her suspension: she had successfully appealed that case, and a judge overturned her suspension and ordered the record expunged: her name was dragged through the mud on bad information.

Compare that to the US where any kind of accusation, even if it turns out to be false, can easily permanently ruin someone's job, career prospects, or life.

starik363• 7 years ago

You can sue for libel in US as well as in Europe.

fromMars12• 7 years ago

I am sure I will get downvoted to oblivion, but I think GDPR is a colossal waste of time and money.

I think mandatory do not track settings are great, but the right to be forgotten is to onerous to implement and not present in other domains.

They do make it harder for smaller businesses to compete.

I can't go to my school or a credit bureau or an insurance company and say that all my past history should be forgotten.

Why should we enforce such a regulation online?

pleasecalllater• 7 years ago

OK, can you also post here all your personal details, so I could sell them to anybody who wants to exploit them to earn money? OK, fine, you don't want to post it here. Could I get them from your bank, work, friends, family, post it here and sell to anybody?

fromMars12• 7 years ago

This is a strawman. You are talking personally identifiable information and data usage policies which is an entirely different thing than the requirement for all data to be deleted.

pbhjpbhj• 7 years ago

They do make it harder for smaller businesses to compete. //

Do you have examples of particular businesses or classes that are particularly affected?

NeedMoreTea3• 7 years ago

right to be forgotten is to onerous to implement and not present in other domains

Not always, but it definitely is. Take the legal system. The UK has something called the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act. After some varying time - dependent on seriousness of offence - I can legally answer "no" to a potential employer asking "have you ever been convicted?".

Google makes a mockery of that. If the law says a 7 year old minor offence is spent, why not search and media too?

They do make it harder for smaller businesses to compete

As someone working mainly for smaller UK businesses over my career, I don't see this at all. Complying with GDPR, and its very similar Data Protection Act predecessor has been fairly trivial.

a credit bureau or an insurance company and say that all my past history should be forgotten

For both credit rating and insurance history, they age out after 5 or 6 years.

Seems like it's online that is wanting the exception of "everything, forever".

fromMars12• 7 years ago

I don't believe that is true. Credit Bureau's and Insurance companies have information about every place you have lived and worked, what school you attended.

The actual ratings may be waited on information in the last X years.

Also, it is much easier to implement a policy where no data can be retained after X years than on-demand wipeout.

detaro9• 7 years ago

I can't go to my school or a credit bureau or an insurance company and say that all my past history should be forgotten. Why should we enforce such a regulation online?

GDPR makes no difference between online and offline businesses: They can keep data if they have a proper justification for it.

fromMars12• 7 years ago

What constitutes proper justification for keeping information?

DanBC5• 7 years ago

I can't go to my school or a credit bureau or an insurance company and say that all my past history should be forgotten.
Why should we enforce such a regulation online?

I'm a bit confused. Exactly the same laws apply to the insurance company and credit bureau. They have to have valid reasons for keeping the data, and if they don't have those reasons they need to get rid of it. Which applies equally to online companies.

GordonS2• 7 years ago

They do make it harder for smaller businesses to compete

Small business person here - implementing GDPR compliance basically meant a few tweaks to our privacy policy to make it clear what data we collect, why we collect it, and how long we retain it for.

Why was it so simple? Because GDPR is honestly not that onerous, and because we already gave a fuck about privacy.

ivan_gammel6• 7 years ago

This all is a reflection of the old talks about the costs of doing technical things right. One way of looking at them is that if something works for business, we should not pursue better software architecture or improve security or usability. Another way is to analyze and estimate the technical debt and eventually start paying it. This is exactly what happens with privacy now: business may cry about "removed incentives", "prohibiting costs", "eliminated opportunities" and other BS, but in the end it's just a compliance debt that they are not willing to pay. GDPR identified that debt and the mechanisms for claiming it, that's it. After the dust settles, there will be plenty of best practices and educated people which will make compliance easy, certain business models unpractical and the business will go as usual. Yes, compliance isn't a piece of cake, but there's nothing written in that law which a sane engineer or manager would not implement. Even the right to be forgotten makes sense: information about past crimes distributed via search is a kind of extrajudicial punishment which makes it much harder for people who already served their sentence to find a job and return to normal life. It's a job of a government to prevent them from committing another crime, it's not a job of a search engine or a news website.

tschellenbach2• 7 years ago

I don't think it's the goal of privacy or the tech that caused the costs to be soo high. Probably more related to the ambiguity of the law.

dmitriid3• 7 years ago

This lw has been in effect in the form of various national laws for over a decade. GDPR is only slightly different from Swedish national Data Protection Law, for example. So yes, this entirely the tech’s fault and debt. We as an industry have ignored these laws for too long, and now crying because the debt is being collected. Boo hoo. Cry me a river.

ivan_gammel6• 7 years ago

I don't think the law is ambiguous. It's usually the situation when GDPR is already violated or going to be violated and data processor wants to find the least expensive solution to reduce the risks. In other words, it's not "How we should do it?", but rather "How difficult it will be to challenge our solution X in court? What our chances to win?" THIS is ambiguous, but it's the same with any regulation.

shrimp_emoji• 7 years ago

You have to admire the EU's gumption: forcing the payment of technical debt with GDPR, and forcing us to face the hard reality of copyright law with Article 13 (hopefully leading us to abolish it after realizing how ridiculous it is when seriously upheld).

There's something so naive or earnestly human about them. If the U.S. kept being the only relevant legal force on the Western Internet, we'd mull around in gray areas forever.

Mirioron10• 7 years ago

On the side of where all the internet platforms are from, it is the US that's relevant. Maybe it's not a coincidence that the EU doesn't produce many internet platforms that are good?

jandrewrogers4• 7 years ago

The scope of what is "personal data" under GDPR is much broader than you are assuming, you are only considering the obvious, simple cases.

It also covers an astonishing amount of industrial sensor data used solely for industrial purposes. Unfortunately, for many high-scale industrial sensor data models the technical infrastructure required for compliance literally does not exist. In some cases we don't even have the computer science required to build the compliance infrastructure. But the vast majority of people would be very upset if the business model of some of these companies became "unpractical" and had to go away because GDPR compliance is effectively impossible. No amount of trying to do the "right thing" will make these industrial companies compliant.

There is gross misconception that GDPR only affects ad tech companies or retail or companies with business models involving people. This is far from the case.

jddj• 7 years ago

Can you point to something which supports this claim?

In all of my reading it's been personal data, and definitely wouldn't apply to the things people would usually associate with "industrial sensors" eg. Carbon monoxide levels in a space, or even occupancy data (eg. for lighting/HVAC control) so long as it simply reflects whether an area within a building is occupied.

What's the specific requirement, and what makes it unattainable?

nudpiedo2• 7 years ago

Meanwhile, people started to believe that Google reads their mind and society evolved the way they behave as The Internet transforms the consequences for acts such as chatting or posting things in public (or having certain opinions in public)... I think GDPR same as other laws protecting citizens from The Internet failed to protect the user, even if it was a good first try, to begin with. Hope some standardization will come in the future to prevent all cookies or some HTML tag standard or whatever.

dcbadacd2• 7 years ago

We have the Do-Not-Track header that should be interpreted as a denial to all cookie notices and GDPR requests but they didn't write that into the law.

anoncake21• 7 years ago

The ePrivacy regulation is supposed to introduce something like like that. Passing it would require the consent of Austria or, of course, a sensible political system for the EU.

nudpiedo2• 7 years ago

exactly, that's what I mean: it cannot be part of a law... but such standard must exist and be enforced by the browser, same as window.alert is a browser pop up and not a javascript one. The cookie rejection should do it in the same way.

Laws like GDPR are encountering problems to be enforced without being too intrusive with the technology and the freedom to create products/standards.

_fizz_buzz_• 7 years ago

I am pretty ok with most of those. However, article 17, the right to be forgotten sounds extremely problematic.

ivan_gammel6• 7 years ago

The right to be forgotten is the equivalent of the right to no punishment without the law. The deeds must be interpreted and judged by a court, not by a public, basing their opinion on newspaper publications. When someone is denied a job because there were some news about him in Google from many years ago, it's a form of extrajudicial punishment, which is illegal, and must be prevented.

seventhtiger2• 7 years ago

It's far too powerful. It makes sense when you think of publishers and articles about criminal cases.

It becomes much harder in social media. If I type your name in a comment that I own, the platform becomes obligated to destroy my intellectual property to satisfy your right to be forgotten.

If a book is written with a politician's name in the title, can the politician ban this book from the Internet?

addicted• 7 years ago

The major benefit that GDPR has brought (at least in our company, and I suspect in other companies as well), is an increased emphasis on not storing user data that is not needed. The idea that user data is useful, but it’s also a liability.

This likely will lead to certain private data that companies would otherwise have saved, because why not, not being saved anymore, which would reduce the damage caused by a breach, which will never show up in numbers and stats.

franciscop5• 7 years ago

Color me surprised, scammy business are losing millions and exiting the EU. I'm totally happy about the outcome.

Though there is still a lot of abuse and dark patterns going on, I believe most of them should make it as easy to "opt all in" as "opt all out" for the cookies for instance.

maximus19835• 7 years ago

The problem is any regulation is that it increases the startup costs for smaller businesses.

So as more regulation comes in it will just end up cementing the large players in place as they can absorb the costs of any regulation, while smaller businesses will have higher startup costs (which lets face it were next to nothing).

So while you maybe rejoicing now that shitty companies have gone for now, regulation will just make it harder for these massive companies to be toppled as it makes it harder for smaller companies to comply.

The EU are trying to have article 13 pushed through and any site that has user generated content will have to have some sort of upload filter to check for copyrighted content. That is going to cost money to implement and since Youtube hasn't really be able to achieve it, the only people that will be supplying the software will be the likes of Google, Microsoft etc ... So again it will just make it harder to the small business and help the large businesses.

Also a lot of these regulations make are making the web a shittier place. Every time I go onto a site now, I have the stupid cookie and GDPR notice plaster in front of what I want to look at. I already protect myself and don't care about their attempt to track me. It is just an irritation that nobody pays attention to and it achieves the opposite of what it was intended to achieve.

oblio• 7 years ago

Legislation is not meant for you (at least for now).

It's meant for those who cannot/do not know how to protect themselves.

CaptainZapp3• 7 years ago

If your business model is scum I'd wager that it should die a slow and painful death.

I really don't see, why a scummy business should get a pass, just because it's a startup.

mattmanser• 7 years ago

I've started 2 startups in the UK since GDPR (well, 1 that happens to sell 2 different products), not really affected me one little bit.

But then again, they're not scummy companies.

Soooooo, bullshit.

I had to put in like a few hours thought into what data I was collecting and how long it was appropriate to keep it.

I happen to know quite a lot about GDPR because I dealt with it at a client I was previously working with, if you want to make it extremely complicated, you can. But you don't have to.

In one we actually track user's behaviour to make better recommendations, but we're open about it and they can disable it if they want. We also delete that data if they delete their account.

It's just a different mindset, it's their data, not yours. You're open about what you're doing and if they want you to delete it, you delete it.

lm28469• 7 years ago

We need regulations because people will go as far as they can to make more money. Businesses were upset when their country banned child labor while their concurrents' country didn't, same when weekends, vacations, reasonable work weeks were introduced. What about safety requirements, food quality inspections, &c.

Self regulating markets are a myth, just look at the US insurance and health industries if you want a proof.

That's also why in healthy countries you get a lot of free passes when you start a business: lower tax rate for a few years, 0% loans, advisors paid by the state, &c.

regulation will just make it harder for these massive companies to be toppled as it makes it harder for smaller companies to comply.

Why did no one topple apple, amazon or google in the last 25 years? If anything the lack of regulations when they started allowed them to become the de facto monopolies we all know today.

iamaelephant• 7 years ago

The problem is any regulation is that it increases the startup costs for smaller businesses.

Why should this be the one thing we optimise for?

pixelmonkey• 7 years ago

I have an interesting question about GDPR and all legal compliance efforts. When GDPR was first announced, I studied it in-depth because I'm the CTO of a company involved in first-party content analytics, and I wanted to ensure we complied.

In addition to making changes internally and technically to ensure compliance, I also prepared a long Google Slide presentation that basically summarized my technical understanding of GDPR, after receiving the advice of several privacy attorneys. The information in this slidedeck was presented to my whole company, as a way to further ensure compliance -- to make sure my employees understood the policy at least as well as I did, since I had spent countless hours discussing the implications of the law -- as well as reading the raw text, which is excellently published/annotated by Algolia here: https://gdpr.algolia.com/gdpr-article-1

My inclination was to publish this deck I had painstakingly prepared publicly, because certainly it would be valuable to others. I publish a lot of stuff publicly on our blog, for example: https://blog.parse.ly/post/author/andrew-montalenti/ -- with the only goal being to share information with the community.

But then, one of my attorneys advised me against this. Basically, the concern was that if I publish something publicly about my understanding of GDPR, and it contains an error of understanding (after all, IANAL), then I could be held accountable for that. That felt really crappy to me -- after all, I'm just doing the best I can, and it seems like there's a lot of misinformation about GDPR out there on the web. Does anyone know anything much about this? To what degree can a company executive get him or herself in trouble for publishing a document that summarizes his or her own understanding of the effect of regulation, if the executive's company is potentially affected by said regulation?

MaupitiBlue• 7 years ago

I am not an EU attorney, but typically the risk with publishing something like that is not that you make a mistake, but rather you get it right. The problem arises down the road when your company does something that violates the law. Now your wonderful presentation is used to prove that your company knew it was violating the law, even though the actual circumstances may be a bit more complicated.

Faark• 7 years ago

Also getting it wrong might indicate they are unintentionally not GDPR compliant and make others aware of that fact. But would that actually be worse than regulators finding out later? Especially when you want to comply?

nihonde4• 7 years ago

“...there’s a lot of misinformation about GDPR out there on the web”

It sounds like your lawyer is telling you not to add to that misinformation. Also, you already said this deck is based on advice from counsel, so you’re maybe dragging them into an endorsement, and there are strict ethical rules about what lawyers can opine about to non-clients.

Anyway, GDPR is not that hard to understand. Just read the source materials. It’s one of the least-difficult legal texts you can take on.

Also, why bother? Like the EU directive before it, there won’t be any meaningful enforcement of these rules. A few examples will be made, but you’ll need to be woefully unlucky to be one of those.

I wish I weren’t so cynical but I’ve been following this area since 1997. It’s just an excuse for lawyers and consultants to rack up fees through careful manipulation of FUD. The intentions of the lawmakers are good, I’m sure, but laws without truly vigilant enforcement are eventually flaunted.

(IAAL but not your lawyer.)

nihonde4• 7 years ago

I’m being downvoted, but the article itself confirms that a huge, wasteful amount of time and money has been thrown down the drain by people who could otherwise just have read the original text: http://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-5419-2016-IN...

phyzome• 7 years ago

Publish it anonymously. :-)

craigsmansion• 7 years ago

then I could be held accountable for that

Held accountable by whom?

To what degree can a company executive get him or herself in trouble for publishing a document

Not from the EU. They are interested in compliance, which you either are or aren't, and will be explained to you why you aren't.

Possibly from your own company, but I assume your understanding and presentation of the GDPR does not hinge on gross negligence and it's a pleasant normal working environment where making a simple mistake will not lead to retribution.

Other than that there are other companies that may follow your guidelines and will be found lacking. I'm not sure about this one, and it might depend on the legal environment of your country.

Depending on your field of endeavour and location, I'd say it might be worth publishing. If customers can see online you take the GDPR serious, it might increase customer confidence, and, should there have been a mistake in your understanding, it might be pointed out to you before it becomes problematic.

maxxxxx2• 7 years ago

"But then, one of my attorneys advised me against this. Basically, the concern was that if I publish something publicly about my understanding of GDPR, and it contains an error of understanding (after all, IANAL), then I could be held accountable for that. That felt really crappy to me -- after all, I'm just doing the best I can, and it seems like there's a lot of misinformation about GDPR out there on the web. Does anyone know anything much about this? To what degree can a company executive get him or herself in trouble for publishing a document that summarizes his or her own understanding of the effect of regulation, if the executive's company is potentially affected by said regulation?"

To me this sounds like typical lawyer paranoia. In what way could you be held accountable for publish your interpretation? You are not giving legal advice.

not_kurt_godel2• 7 years ago

It may or may not be overly paranoid, but I think the risk would essentially be that a publicly stated incorrect interpretation could be successfully used in court as evidence of failure to comply. I doubt the executive themselves would be held directly liable or be personally punished, it's just that it's a risk for the company that doesn't have any tangible benefit from a legal standpoint - so from a lawyer's perspective, why do it?

That being said - it seems unlikely that his understanding would be inaccurate given the amount of time and research and he claims to have done, so the actual risk could be negligible. It might even be conceivable that such a public statement could be used as legal evidence in the company's favor showing that the CEO took every practical step possible to comply to the best of a reasonable and well-informed person's understanding of the law. The public relations boost of giving out good knowledge/guidance (attracting talent, customers/clients) might be sufficiently beneficial to justify the risk.

anoncake21• 7 years ago

If your account gets hacked, the hacker can use the right of access to get all of your data.

If your account gets hacked, the hacker has access to your account. Duh.

The right to be forgotten is in conflict with the public’s right to know a bad actor’s history (and many of them are using the right to memory hole their misdeeds).

People can change. Newspapers can exaggerate one's misdeeds.

And the right to opt-out of data collection creates a free-rider problem where users who opt-in subsidize the privacy of those who opt-out.

Opting out of data collection isn't a thing under the GDPR. Breaking business models that involve people selling their privacy is an intended consequence of the GDPR.

“Amazon sent 1,700 Alexa voice recordings to the wrong user following data request” (The Verge)

Doesn't sound like a company that can be trusted to ensure people's privacy without regulation.

“The problem with data portability is that it goes both ways: if you can take your data out of Facebook to other applications, you can do the same thing in the other direction. The question, then, is which entity is likely to have the greater center of gravity with regards to data: Facebook, with its social network, or practically anything else?” (Ben Thompson)

Freedom includes the freedom to make bad decisions.

“Presumably data portability would be imposed on Facebook’s competitors and potential competitors as well. That would mean all future competing firms would have to slot their products into a Facebook-compatible template. Let’s say that 17 years from now someone has a virtual reality social network innovation: does it have to be “exportable” into Facebook and other competitors?

No more than Facebook has to create a search engine so you can export your search history into Google.

“About 220,000 name tags will be removed in Vienna by the end of [2018], the city’s housing authority said. Officials fear that they could otherwise be fined up to $23 million, or about $1,150 per name.” (The Washington Post)

The data protection authorities later told them that this is bullshit.

As of March 20, 2019, 1,129 US news sites are still unavailable in the EU due to GDPR. (Joseph O’Connor)

"Losing" businesses that don't respect privacy is intended. It's kinda flattering that so many US news sites specifically cater to EU residents, making them subject to the GDPR. But frankly: We don't care much about your local news.

During a Senate hearing, Keith Enright, Google’s chief privacy officer, estimated that the company spent “hundreds of years of human time” to comply with the new privacy rules. (Quartz)
However, French authorities ultimately decided Google’s compliance efforts were insufficient: “France fines Google nearly $57 million for first major violation of new European privacy regime” (The Washington Post)

The French authorities rightfully didn't care how much time Google spent on not complying with the GDPR.

Tradeoff between privacy regulations and market competition

Oh no, we might lose the ad market.

GDPR has been the death knell for small and medium-sized businesses

Companies that cannot safeguard their users' privacy shouldn't exist, not to mention those whose business model is based on infringing on their users' privacy.

---------------------------------------------

The "arguments" ad companies use against the GDPR are just absurd.

EU 2016: We don't want businesses based on violating our citizens' privacy to operate anymore. You have two years two comply.

Ad companies 2018: Evil government! If you force us to stop violating our customers' privacy, we will stop violating our customers' privacy! You will regret this! And why didn't you warn us?

---------------------------------------------

GDPR: You must ask your customers to opt into data collection, letting them opt out is not sufficient.

Ad companies: The evil EU fined us for not complying with the GDPR! That's unfair! How could we know that "letting them opt out is not sufficient" means that letting them opt out is not sufficient? The GDPR is so vague! And we spent so much money on not complying!

rndgermandude• 7 years ago

GDPR has been the death knell for small and medium-sized businesses

Yeah, and drug and tobacco regulation was the death knell for many small and medium-sized businesses. Kill the GDPR, Abolish the FDA!

dmitriid3• 7 years ago

And the right to opt-out of data collection creates a free-rider problem where users who opt-in subsidize the privacy of those who opt-out.

The actual fuck? Pardon the language, but I cannot express this strongly enough.

What does ”subsidize” mean? Users who agree to sell their data subsidize those who agree not to sell their data? And not having to rely on data sales puts financial burden on companies and drives them out of business? Good riddance

friedman235• 7 years ago

Startups: One study estimated that venture capital invested in EU startups fell by as much as 50 percent due to GDPR implementation. (NBER)

https://www.nber.org/papers/w25248

That is massive. This will just further brain drain even more.

umvi• 7 years ago

Does GDPR mean blockchain based records are illegal? If a user's data is in the blockchain, there is no way to delete it...

lewis10282823• 7 years ago

Yes but it is personal information about a living person? I doubt it, it's pseudo-anonymous so I believe it is legal under GDPR.

Avamander4• 7 years ago

Certificate Transparency logs contain personal information about a few people right now. Is that legal?

idlewords• 7 years ago

Listing Klout as a casualty of the GDPR is like listing polio as a casualty of vaccination. Ditto for the vast swamp of ad intermediaries. It shows the legislation working as intended.

jandrewrogers4• 7 years ago

This overlooks one of the biggest under-reported problems GDPR has created: a large percentage of all industrial sensor data is "personal data" under GDPR. These are systems and companies that nobody associates with collecting or using personal data, because their business isn't about people, but the regulations have defined the scope broadly enough that there is universal agreement among their legal experts that are liable for not treating this data as "personal" under GDPR.

This raises some difficult challenges that the average Internet business doesn't have to deal with:

- Compliance with GDPR requirements for personal data in many industrial settings is operationally impossible. These aren't Internet ad tech databases.

- Some industrial systems aren't the kinds of things you can trivially upgrade to make them compliant in any case. We are talking embedded systems with operational lifespans measured in decades. In many cases there are other strict regulatory compliance requirements around the design and modification of these systems.

- The workloads and data models for some high-scale sensor data models make it technically impossible, given the current state of computer science and hardware, to comply with some obligations under GDPR when handling "personal" data. And for a much larger set of systems, it would be economically implausible even though theoretically possible.

- Sensor data infrastructure software often lacks the basic functionality required to support compliance, as the functionality that the regulators assumed exists for other purposes has no purpose in this context and therefore has never been implemented. There is a disconnect between what is required of the software users and what the upstream vendors can or are willing to provide. These aren't software companies.

- For some specific industry sectors, compliance costs disproportionately fall on EU-based companies by virtue of the fact that their primary operations are in a European country, even though they sell into a global market. That's an economic own goal.

This has become a Sword of Damocles over some industrial companies because their legal teams have studied their exposure to GDPR, identified substantial compliance obligations, and realized that compliance is effectively impossible. It is pretty clear to me that the regulators were so focused on Internet advertising companies and similar that they were completely oblivious to the unintended consequences for unrelated industrial sectors.

I've been studying this problem for a few industrial sectors for a couple years now. You have companies scrambling to find technology that often doesn't exist and in some cases requires hardcore computer science R&D before it could exist. And this is a business opportunity for someone to add a tax to what these companies produce. But the worst part is that this extremely expensive compliance exercise does almost nothing for personal privacy because most of this data was being collected for boring industrial applications.

jorams• 7 years ago

a large percentage of all industrial sensor data is "personal data" under GDPR

Could you give some examples? I can't think of anything off the top of my head.

jandrewrogers4• 7 years ago

Many industrial companies measure the operational environment at massive scales now using multimodal sensor networks and platforms thanks to plummeting sensor costs -- LIDAR, hyper-spectral imaging, video, RF/radar, audio, remote sensing, chemical and particulate sensors, et al. The exact mix and scope of coverage varies with industry and company. Sectors are diverse and include automative, utilities, agriculture, oil and gas, logistics, etc. The sensor data is primarily used to manage risk, increase efficiency, improve safety, adapt to changing conditions, respond to incidents, do preventative maintenance, and similar.

Any sensor platform that can detect the existence of an entity in space and time and is measuring space where people exist, which is most of them, is collecting personal data. A sophisticated party can reconstruct the identity of detected entities in the sensor data in a straightforward way. Typically, the sensor coverage inherently collects data on a large number of people from which it is impossible to obtain consent, whoever happens to be within or wanders into the sensor range. The detectable people in these sensor data models are analytical by-catch. I've demonstrated this to many organizations using diverse exhaust from industrial sensor systems never designed for that purpose.

Some of these data models are incredibly large and fast moving, petabytes per day. Many of them collect data in federated environments that are severely bandwidth-limited and energy restricted; while the data model is very rich, there aren't enough local resources to do anything outside the designed scope. You can neither push compliance operations to the data, since there isn't enough compute, nor can you backhaul it to someplace that does. The aggregate data models can exceed an exabyte, so you aren't indexing where people are (that would be incredibly expensive) and any attempt to brute-force search to identify people for compliance purposes would effectively be a denial-of-service attack on the system.

tl;dr: the scale and scope of external environmental sensing platforms increasingly used by industrial companies inherently allows you to detect the locations of many people in space and time that are unrelated to the business operation. The necessary scale and operational architecture of these systems make GDPR compliance technically implausible.

Quanttek6• 7 years ago

individual “data rights” have led to unintended consequences; “privacy protection” seems to have undermined market competition;

That opening paragraph already speaks to the over-elevation of the market over any other concerns. So it perfectly fits onto "news.ycombinator.com". Human rights, including privacy and data rights, are more important than the profits of some companies

Most examples in the text are, for instance, related to companies failing to properly implement the GDPR (Amazon sending data to the wrong person, Spotify not asking for 2FA/email confirmation for the bulk download, companies deleting articles even when there would sufficient public interest, Ad vendors failing to ensure compliance and therefore seeing drops in demand, ...), that is, market failures - something this site would probably not call out but rather attribute it to the legislation.

Camas• 7 years ago

that is, market failures - something this site would probably not call out but rather attribute it to the legislation.

Socially shaming companies does very little compared to legislation, so that's completely understandable.

Quanttek6• 7 years ago

In general this might be agreeable. But in these cases these are not direct unintended consequences of the legislation but rather consequences of companies failing to do their due diligence when implementing GDPR. It would be like companies putting people in bomb disposal suits after sth like OSHA is implemented and complaining about the cost and lost productivity. Or to take the EU: Recently the CJEU ruled that all work time has to be tracked (not only overtime), and a German company (in Germany this wasn't mandated before) would force employees to install invasive phone apps that track location etc. and use to determine work time. Employees rightfully complaining should direct their anger at the company, not at a law that would work perfectly well with a standard punch card system

Zak2• 7 years ago

That opening paragraph already speaks to the over-elevation of the market over any other concerns. So it perfectly fits onto "news.ycombinator.com"

I have not found the cultural climate on HN to be opposed to the GDPR at all. Both its goals and its implementation seem to be popular here overall, and most comments I see that are critical of it get enough downvotes to have their text significantly desaturated even if they're making a good argument.

It's my impression, though I have not worked in the field that people operating ad networks believe some kind of tracking is necessary to prevent click fraud, and do not want to sell ads free of any tracking even when they have customers asking for the option. I don't know how true this claim is or whether alternatives have been adequately explored.

What I do know is that some of the industries that use ads, such as newspapers are struggling to make enough money to continue operating. Nobody will miss a scummy adtech firm, but people might miss local news outlets. It's valid to talk about the impact on business not just in terms of profits, but also considering potential positive externalities of the continued operation of a given business.

jdietrich5• 7 years ago

Purely anecdotal, but I've had many debates over the last year on HN with people who claim that GDPR is just protectionism - rather than being a sincere effort to improve human rights online, they argue that it's just a sour-grapes effort to cripple American tech companies.

anoncake21• 7 years ago

I have not found the cultural climate on HN to be opposed to the GDPR at all.

That strongly depends on the time of day, read: Whether Europe or America is awake.

frostburg• 7 years ago

I recall a discussion on the matter. Everyone that wasn't selling ads felt that if it was impossible to sell ads without tracking due to "click fraud", there was no obligation from society to prop up their failing business model by letting them ignore the privacy rights of the public just because it was expedient to do so.

manigandham6• 7 years ago

Many in adtech do support privacy and data protection, after all they're just people too and want a good experience online.

The problem is that GDPR is well intentioned but poorly implemented, a common occurrence in politics with examples in lots of sectors. These kinds of unintended consequences are what happens when politicians don't quite understand the nuances of an industry and focus more on regulation-in-principle and showboating rather than actually effective rules.

hannasanarion3• 7 years ago

Most examples in the text are, for instance, related to companies failing to properly implement the GDPR (... companies deleting articles even when there would sufficient public interest,...)

Some of those examples were deceptively reported. For example, the doctor who asked The Guardian to take down articles about her suspension: she had successfully appealed that case, and a judge overturned her suspension and ordered the record expunged: her name was dragged through the mud on bad information. This is exactly what right to be forgotten is meant for.

tolmasky• 7 years ago

If the fundamental thesis is that "the market fails" or that "corporations are irresponsible", then at the very least it should be predictable that some of these regulations will have the real negative consequences (which I think we can agree some of these are) expressed in this article. The goal of this realization is not necessarily to disparage the GDPR, but hopefully to learn and perhaps put together a more precise or better iteration in place that avoids these pitfalls. For example:

Spotify not asking for 2FA/email confirmation for the bulk download

I'm not extremely familiar with the letter of the law, but if it doesn't specify that you need 2FA/email, and there are clear fines/downsides to not complying, I do not see how this is not a predictable issue that would come up. The incentive is to comply, since you've already put in the work to make it possible, and there are onerous punishments for not doing so. In other words, a false negative (disallowing the download) can be potentially perceived as much worse than a false positive (allowing the download). This seems built-in: the goal of the law was to give it teeth to allow the user to get this data. If we just default to "its the companies fault for not applying an additional layer of thought to all this", then whether its true or not (and I agree it is!), it does not realistically solve the problem - establishing blame doesn't necessarily provide a path to making this less likely in the future as long as the equation is still heavily weighted towards disincentivizing false negatives. This is another way of saying: if we want to characterize corporations as lazy/malicious/what-have-you, then we can't then be Pikachu-surprised-face when they act that way under the letter of the law like some monkey's paw scenario: we should instead "aw shucks, fool me once" and try to come up with something better.

companies deleting articles even when there would sufficient public interest

Similarly, we should try to predict that it is entirely plausible that the rights will be attempted to be abused, or leveraged, by those that it provides an obvious benefit for, even if it is malicious. Here again it is interesting that we begin with the thesis that "we need these laws because companies have proven not sufficiently responsible enough on their own" and yet then immediately make a law that is vague and thus defers major parts of the decision to these same companies. Many times this ultimately comes down to litigation where the boundaries of laws are worked out, and this is a very reasonable response: its only been a year, the courts will hopefully work out when these rules are mis-applied. However, it is on us to make sure we litigate "too much" right to forget (as in the cases here) and not just cases where companies refuse to forget. If not, the courts will send a clear message that it is perfectly fine to blindly abide by every request as the path of least resistance. Again: the premise is that they don't care, and we still haven't figured out how to legislate caring.

icebraining5• 7 years ago

I'm not extremely familiar with the letter of the law, but if it doesn't specify that you need 2FA/email

The Regulation doesn't mandate specific technical implementations anywhere; it leaves that to the industry, which is the expert in that regard. But on the subject of the Right of Access it does explicitly say:

"The controller should use all reasonable measures to verify the identity of a data subject who requests access, in particular in the context of online services and online identifiers"

It seems to me that not using 2FA/email means they haven't used all reasonable measures to verify the identity.

blfr• 7 years ago

Market competition is usually in the opposite to profits. Market competition usually works against the competing companies and in favour of their customers.

dev_dull• 7 years ago

Shhh, that kind of talk goes against the “market bad regulation good” thinking in vogue right now.

Quanttek6• 7 years ago

That is true in theory but it is not (solely) what is at stake here. Here, we are talking about the cost of regulations, and these do eat into the profits of companies. To some extent, these costs could also hurt competition (assuming the competitor had the same data-vacuuming business model). While we can not directly say whether the (possible) decrease in competition compensates for the compliance costs, looking at the overwhelming opposition by businesses small and large (incl FANG), it seems like the cost are higher.

manigandham6• 7 years ago

This ideological purity doesn't work well in the real world, and it's not about profits either.

People don't care about privacy as much as you imagine them to, especially if they have to give up everything they get for ads today. One look at what people willingly share to the world on social media shows that.

But powerful monopolies are a problem and market competition is the correct answer to that power. Regulation isn't a magic cure and should be used to place guardrails on the market, but in this case could've been written far better to provide data protection without entrenching the major players even further.

icebraining5• 7 years ago

in this case could've been written far better to provide data protection without entrenching the major players even further.

Could it? How?

YeGoblynQueenne• 7 years ago

> That opening paragraph already speaks to the over-elevation of the market over any other concerns. So it perfectly fits onto "news.ycombinator.com". Human rights, including privacy and data rights, are more important than the profits of some companies.

What do you mean? I use news.ycombinator.com every day and I consider human rights, and consumer rights such as privacy, to be extremely important. In fact, I use news.ycombinator.com because there is a very strong current in support of such principles by the users here.

There is also a strong streak of free-market capitalism and technology-first, you-can't-stop-progress techno-optimism, but that is the point. This site offers opportunities for debate.

You're assuming too much if you're extrapolating from a few comments you disagreed with to the entire userbase of this site. HackerNews is not an echo chamber. Not yet, anyway.

soulofmischief• 7 years ago

I'd say the consequences were intended.

companies deleting articles even when there would sufficient public interest

Is that really part of GDPR? That just seems authoritative.

Quanttek6• 7 years ago

Not really. The GDPR stipulates a right to be forgotten [1] with the following exceptions:

3. Paragraphs 1 and 2 shall not apply to the extent that processing is necessary:
(a) for exercising the right of freedom of expression and information;
(b) for compliance with a legal obligation which requires processing by Union or Member State law to which the controller is subject or for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the controller;
(c) for reasons of public interest in the area of public health in accordance with points (h) and (i) of Article 9(2) as well as Article 9(3);
(d) for archiving purposes in the public interest, scientific or historical research purposes or statistical purposes in accordance with Article 89(1) in so far as the right referred to in paragraph 1 is likely to render impossible or seriously impair the achievement of the objectives of that processing; or
(e) for the establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims.

[1] https://gdpr-info.eu/art-17-gdpr/

billconan2• 7 years ago

When GDPR first came out, I found the terms pretty vague. I don't know how I can implement it.

For example, a user's email is Personally Identifiable Information. When the user wants to delete her account, I shall remove her email. This is ease.

But what if in my comment system, another user mentioned her email in a comment. Do I need to remove this comment too? What if this comment has replies too, should I remove all the replies?

What if a competitor make use of these undocumented gray areas to attack my business?

anoncake21• 7 years ago

What if a competitor make use of these undocumented gray areas to attack my business?

Then your regulator might ask you to remove the comment in question.

Drdrdrq• 7 years ago

Yes, you need to remove the said comment (or PII in it) upon their request (ianal,...). I don't see how a competitor could abuse that.

billconan2• 7 years ago

Because you now need to implement a full text search or even natural language processing to identify personal identities in your comment, and that’s quite challenging. An evil competitor could register several accounts, purposely leave those comments with personal identities of those accounts on the system and then request to remove one of the accounts.

Your algorithm needs to parse those comments, identify which Comments mentioned the to be removed identity, and remove them without breaking the integrity of your database. Failing to do that, you get sued...

rietta• 7 years ago

Pottery Barn, owned by Williams-Sonoma, is a weird mention. They sell household goods from mall stores and their online catalog. There exposure to GDPR should be pretty minimal. Ship the product and don't sell your customer list and basic security work that they should be doing already.

downandout2• 7 years ago

This seems like a pretty even-handed analysis of the consequences of GDPR. I correctly predicted most of them, and have been highly criticized for it.

It’s truly stunning to me that a community like HN that consists of many current and future startup executives can be so adoring of regulation that has “been the death knell for small and medium-sized businesses“ and for which “compliance costs are astronomical” according to the article. I sense that it is mostly the vocal minority making these comments that ignore the seriously negative consequences of GDPR and paint any company or person that is critical of it as a privacy abuser. I suspect that it is the same small group of abusive users that downvote any comment critical of GDPR into oblivion. Still, it is a very bad look for a community that claims to be so invested in startup culture.

It really is OK to recognize that something with good intent (privacy legislation) can be poorly written and consequently fraught with problems (like GDPR). Any idiot could have predicted that the fine structure they imposed meant potential death for small businesses and a mere speed bump for large ones. GDPR should be torn up and rewritten. The fine structure should be a percentage of revenue, period - not 4% of revenue or €20 million, whichever is higher. That is ludicrous and was designed specifically to drive small businesses out of the market.

downandout2• 7 years ago

I suspect that it is the same small group of abusive users that downvote any comment critical of GDPR into oblivion.

Case in point, this post. Downvoted with no replies - just a handful of people hiding behind their mice with no counterarguments.

simplecomplex• 7 years ago

Glad I live in and do business from the US where we don’t have to deal with this wasteful and oppressive law.

admax88q• 7 years ago

Amazon sent 1,700 Alexa voice recordings to the wrong user following data request

You know the best way to prevent sending 1,700 voice recordings? Not making 1,700 voice recordings in the first place.

Amazon will eventually mess up and send leak data to the wrong person. Blaming this on the GDPR is stupid. If Amazon actually respected user privacy they wouldn't make those recordings in the first place.

liveoneggs• 7 years ago

every GDPR request I've seen has been public figures (actors, etc) asking to be forgotten from commercial acts (movies) they were in and no longer like. It's ridiculous.

scarlac• 7 years ago

Several specifically pre-GDPR issues are mentioned but still attributed to GDPR.

GDPR is a win for the consumer. Not perfect, but overall a great step forward. But I do think The Right To Be Forgotten is a terrible idea. However, it was NOT introduced with GDPR, and there are several cases prior to GDPR.

Perhaps there are good points to be made. But the article fails to stay sober with the misleading and sensational claims.

davidhyde• 7 years ago

Highlighting the cost of privacy is the very point of GDPR. This is the only way companies will stop collecting personal data by default and think very carefully about the consequences of what they keep.

lucb1e• 7 years ago

Well that's a rather biased account with cherry picked and anecdotical evidence.

GDPR After One Year

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