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How the GDPR Will Disrupt Google and Facebook

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Re: How the GDPR Will Disrupt Google and Facebook

#151

Post by ariwilson »

cm2187 wrote: post #119
golemotron wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never understood what would happen if Google or Facebook just ignored EU regulations, claimed that they were not under the EU's jurisdiction, and ignored any judgement. Would the EU erect a great firewall at that point?

The US happily enforces its own legislation outside of its territory (particularly in the financial world). By almost every single metric, the EU is bigger than the US. You could argue the EU is merely following the US footsteps.

Economically, EU will be substantially smaller than the US after the UK leaves.

Re: How the GDPR Will Disrupt Google and Facebook

#152

Post by s17n »

golemotron wrote: post #58
mnm1 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish more penalties were like this. This sounds great. Now these companies will finally have real incentive to comply. Hell, the percentages should be higher. That's the only way to enforce regulations. Otherwise, they'll just pay a puny fine, American style, and not do shit.

I've never understood what would happen if Google or Facebook just ignored EU regulations, claimed that they were not under the EU's jurisdiction, and ignored any judgement. Would the EU erect a great firewall at that point?

All of these companies do business in the EU, have offices and employees in the EU, etc. They are clearly subject to EU jurisdiction.

They could shut down all their European operations, but that would cost them a lot more than 4% of revenue.

Re: How the GDPR Will Disrupt Google and Facebook

#153

Post by goodplay »

michalskop wrote: post #106
austinheap wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just use my old Britannica CDs. Completely private.

Using DuckDuckGo is fine for let say 98% of my searches (most of them probably IT related). For the rest, I go to Google or Bing or others. Is there Britannica on flash drives? I should add it to those 2%.

Wikipedia can be downloaded in its entirety in an easy to use package. For STEM articles, it's better than Britannica (and cheaper too).

Re: How the GDPR Will Disrupt Google and Facebook

#154

Post by davidgerard »

We [technology dept at a non-computer business in the UK] got the lecture about this at work. Turns out geeks are fans of this approach!

I've been using "GDPR hazard" as a useful way to kill bad ideas at work. "Sure you can do that! We just need you to confirm that your business unit accepts responsibility for this user-identifying data and ... oh, we can delete it? I'll do that now then."

We have lots of user-identified data, going back years. I can't see it as a bad thing for us to behave properly with regard to it, and to be required to do so.

Re: How the GDPR Will Disrupt Google and Facebook

#155

Post by Silhouette »

s17n wrote: post #152
golemotron wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never understood what would happen if Google or Facebook just ignored EU regulations, claimed that they were not under the EU's jurisdiction, and ignored any judgement. Would the EU erect a great firewall at that point?

All of these companies do business in the EU, have offices and employees in the EU, etc. They are clearly subject to EU jurisdiction. They could shut down all their European operations, but that would cost them a lot more than 4% of revenue.

They could shut down all their European operations, but that would cost them a lot more than 4% of revenue.

There's an interesting assumption in there, and I'm not entirely sure it's a correct one. Facebook and its subsidiaries play a large part in many people's everyday lives now, in particular forming the main way a lot of people stay in touch with their friends and family. It is not at all clear to me what would happen if Facebook decided to call the EU's bluff here and literally switched off its service to everyone in the EU for a day or two, replacing it with a single page explaining that until the law was changed they would not be able to provide their service to EU customers.

Re: How the GDPR Will Disrupt Google and Facebook

#157

Post by tyfon »

throwaway_9123 wrote: post #54
shadowtree wrote: post #32

And if you think GDPR is a toothless joke, let's take a look at the defined fine stucture. It is pretty simple, only 3 levels (strikes for the fellow Americans): Strike 1 - Stern warning letter Strike 2 - 2% of your TOTAL GLOBAL REVENUE Strike 3 - 4% of your TOTAL GLOBAL REVENUE (or 20mil EUR, whichever is higher) And now you know why GDPR is a board level topic. Keep in mind that the EU/US Safe Harbor agreement got…

Throwaway account. I have national sales responsibilities for one of the majors. Think IBM/Microsoft/Oracle/etc leading a sales team of 74 reps. You'd be surprised at how LITTLE sales we've generated from GDPR. We've been providing free GDPR assessments for the past 1.5 years for over 200 accounts as lead gen opportunity and very little sales have resulted. It all boils down to companies simply don't believe the fine…

I work in a (small) bank, but we are already quite far in implementing GDPR.

Most of it is done by our internal development team or the core system providers we use. No need for external consultants.

From what I can tell, the whole banking industry is busy implementing this, at least here in Norway.

The fines are real..

Re: How the GDPR Will Disrupt Google and Facebook

#158

Post by Silhouette »

nvarsj wrote: post #95
antoncohen wrote: post #94

I encourage a little more thought before cheering this on as a win. While GDPR isn't as ridiculous as the Cookie Law, it still shows that the EU/EC don't understand the technology they are trying to regulate, and it comes at a huge cost to tech companies. Take the right to be forgotten . First of all, it should be common sense that no one has the right to force legitimate news articles to disappear because they don't…

> it comes at a huge cost to tech companies Doesn't it just affect companies which rely heavily on lack of privacy for monetisation? I think that's sort of the point - that your business should not rely on tracking individuals and selling that information without their consent to gov/private bodies. It's obviously a huge change, since so many big tech players rely on this to make profits. But the internet will be a m…

Doesn't it just affect companies which rely heavily on lack of privacy for monetisation?

No, unfortunately not.

Re: How the GDPR Will Disrupt Google and Facebook

#159

Post by cbr »

antoncohen wrote: post #94

I encourage a little more thought before cheering this on as a win. While GDPR isn't as ridiculous as the Cookie Law, it still shows that the EU/EC don't understand the technology they are trying to regulate, and it comes at a huge cost to tech companies. Take the right to be forgotten . First of all, it should be common sense that no one has the right to force legitimate news articles to disappear because they don't…

    If you follow GDPR strictly you would need to be
    able to purge the data from your backups.
    Now most backups are considered immutable, so
   you aren't going to do that
Encrypt with a user-specific key, and destroy that key to drop all backups concerning that user.

Re: How the GDPR Will Disrupt Google and Facebook

#160

Post by saurik »

antoncohen wrote: post #127
bjl wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You will basically need to hire full-time compliance officers to deal with this. The big tech companies already have compliance officers, but GDPR is so massively invasive to businesses that even small companies now need compliance officers. Or they could, I don't know, just not collect that data in the first place.

It isn't that simple. When people think about these privacy laws that is what they think about, some evil corporation tracking tons of private info. The company I work for has no ads. It does no analytics on personal info. It does nothing you would care about. What it is is a SasS product for businesses. We aren't the controller, so we don't need permission from end users, our customers need to get permission from th…

> Fine, we now have an engineer building GDPR features instead of features that benefit our customers.

I am not finding any shred of sympathy for your story. To me this sounds approximately as evil as saying you are a pipeline company having to comply with all of those pesky environmental and occupational regulations by spending money on worthless safety features for people working and living on or around the pipe, and that none of this benefits your customers: the oil companies.

Yes: you built a bunch of software around a specific set of assumptions about what you were allowed to do, and in the process you took advantage of cost savings by ignoring externalities such as information privacy, and now that this law exists you will be negatively affected. However, the point of this law is to say what you were doing was NOT OK and that future companies should not do this and existing ones had better figure out a way to stop doing this.

In a perfect world, everyone would have built these featurs in to their systems without this law, but they didn't, so now you all are going to get punished. If your business is still possible (and I have no particularly care if it isn't) and any of your competitors had spent the in your mind wasted effort making sure this was possible in the past, then I am not just OK with but extremely delighted that they will now have a competitive advantage over you as you scramble to retool.

You are essentially asking for sympathy here without first taking a step back and showing that any of what you were doing was not just expedient for you, and not just beneficial to you, but that it was also simultaneously what people other than you deserved: the presumption here is that you are the villain, and it is really hard to ask for sympathy from that position, and I can tell you all you are doing from my reading is digging yourself a deeper pit.

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