Ask HN: Why are law documents (GDPR) so difficult to understand?

There's a very simple way around that problem - don't ask for your user's data.

The GDPR is about making sure you do your best to protect what they share with you. If they don't need to share anything then there is no burden on you to protect anything. In my opinion this is the ideal outcome. If you gather their data then there really should be a burden on you and your business to do the necessary work to make sure you've done at least the minimum to protect what they've shared, especially if you're profiting from that data.

Look at any profession -- accounting for instance -- and they have all sorts of stuff like this. As an example, there's a concept in accounting of "materiality" - basically, something that's big enough to matter. Materiality is what lets fortune 500 companies present their financial statements rounded to the nearest thousand dollars. When you're talking about tens/hundreds of millions, individual dollars just don't matter.

Whether or not something is "material" is a matter of professional judgment, to be made in the context of a large body of professional knowledge, history, prevailing industry standards, economic/cost considerations, etc, basically that thing called "experience" that we so often toss under the bus in SV.

Perhaps the biggest difference between law and code, which are in many ways quite similar, is that law is highly reliant on context. For a court to determine whether "appropriate security" and "appropriate technical measures" are followed, they would solicit testimony from experts in the field (people like us) to determine whether they felt whether someone took "appropriate security". So ultimately it's a matter of opinion, but one made with context and expertise.

It works surprisingly well.

EDIT: For really complicated stuff, implementation is often delegated to an agency, such as the FCC, to create specific guidelines like you want. But this is the job of executive action, which is easy to change, not statute (on-the-books laws), which is much harder to modify once passed.

Why is it that way? When you're writing a contract or a law, having words that let you state precisely what you mean saves a lot of trouble and confusion. We can go to court about people actually breaking the law or the contract, rather than about what the definition of "is" is.

And, as that snarky example illustrated, sometimes it doesn't work. Sometimes you wind up arguing exactly about the definition of words. But the precision of words in the legal community means that that happens a lot less often than it otherwise would.