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Shutting Down Forum (GDPR)

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Re: Shutting Down Forum (GDPR)

#311
post #203

How can it be hard for a forum to comply to GDPR? What kind of private information does it really need to save?

I'm a European that supports the GDPR but here's my take on the issue in the post. I don't think it would be hard for the person in the post to comply, it would just be time consuming. Say for example that a user requests a data transcript. Well he will have to collect all the post etc from that user and send it somehow. Now this is probably just a simple SQL query but it takes a bit of time, time that many people do…

I'd be surprised if the forum software he uses doesn't already support self-service for that

Re: Shutting Down Forum (GDPR)

#312
post #33

I don't know why all these websites are shutting down due to GDPR when all you have to do is hire a competent law firm with GDPR compliance expertise to review your software and help you determine if any parts need to change to become compliant and also help you address any GDPR requests.

Everyone was saying that you don't need to worry about GDPR unless you are a scumbag that is selling user information. This open source project owner must have been doing something unethical if they are shutting down their forum due to GDPR.

[flagged]

Re: Shutting Down Forum (GDPR)

#313

The owner says that he doesn't have time to review GDPR-related requests; that's fine. But I wonder if he would receive a US court order would he treat it the same way? What if he received a letter from NSA? A DMCA request? What if someone posted something illegal on the forum, would he ignore that as well? It seems like he has no time only for legislation from EU.

Yes, this is really little different from shutting down a whole forum because you received a single DMCA request. If anything it's even more of an overreaction, because a DMCA request could be followed up by legal action, whereas a data subject can't sue. All they can do is report you to the regulator. The regulator is unlikely to do anything if it's a frivolous request. Even if it's legitimate, their first action th…

> Yes, this is really little different from shutting down a whole forum because you received a single DMCA request.

Completely unrelated. Not only are DMCA requests easier to handle than data access requests, the fines for not complying with GDPR are disproportionately larger for violating DMCA.

Work required for complying with a DMCA request: delete the offending material, a basic feature implemented on every single piece of forum software

Work required for complying with a data access request: Search every single service you potentially could have stored user data in and provide it to the user. A non basic feature that requires custom development.

Additionally any malevolent user (as is shown in this case) is incentivized to send a GDPR data access request while this is not true for DMCA.

I agree however that they are both horrible laws. So if your argument was to show that GDPR is just as bad as the DMCA I agree. GDPR is a horrible law and it is not obvious to me that the law wasn't created specifically to target non European business.

Re: Shutting Down Forum (GDPR)

#314
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that's an interesting question about the line for GDPR and the right to be forgotten. If a user themself posts text onto a forum, I wouldn't consider that private information. If it's not private info, I wouldn't think they should be able to legally request it be deleted. That would be almost like an editor of a wikipedia article asking that it be removed. I wonder how GDPR applies.

Gdpr doesn’t have a clause for voluntary, required or accidental sharing. If a user publishes on your forum he has disabilities, congratulations, under gdpr you just leaked user personal data of the worst kind.

> If a user publishes on your forum he has disabilities, congratulations, under gdpr you just leaked user personal data of the worst kind.

I'm really not sure what people think they're gaining from posting these wildly inaccurate GDPR comments.

Re: Shutting Down Forum (GDPR)

#315
post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone was saying that you don't need to worry about GDPR unless you are a scumbag that is selling user information. This open source project owner must have been doing something unethical if they are shutting down their forum due to GDPR.

[flagged]

Good try buddy

Re: Shutting Down Forum (GDPR)

#316
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that's an interesting question about the line for GDPR and the right to be forgotten. If a user themself posts text onto a forum, I wouldn't consider that private information. If it's not private info, I wouldn't think they should be able to legally request it be deleted. That would be almost like an editor of a wikipedia article asking that it be removed. I wonder how GDPR applies.

Gdpr doesn’t have a clause for voluntary, required or accidental sharing. If a user publishes on your forum he has disabilities, congratulations, under gdpr you just leaked user personal data of the worst kind.

No, you do what's necessary to fullfill the service you provide to the user: they wanted to publish a forum post, you store and publish the submitted data as is necessary to offer this. That's neither a leak nor forbidden.

Re: Shutting Down Forum (GDPR)

#317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its predecessor regulation capped fines at around $750k. Guess how many were levied at or near the maximum? Zero. The only large fines were for serious, deliberate abuses, such as a group maintaining a secret blacklist of construction employees. This isn't like the massive fines from US regulators on foreign companies. The rules say that fines should be proportionate to the scale of the breach and the harm caused. Th…

When a new law is enacted, it's not prudent analysis to assume anything about how it will be enforced based on the previous law, especially not when fines were increased 25x - GDPR is not a minor clarification of a few bits and pieces, it's a whole new thing. The previous law was specifically criticised for having no teeth, and the new law has specifically been highlighted for it's new teeth. Of course it's possible…

That doesn't mean lawyer up or shut down at the first request. Of course you should be prepared, by doing sensible things like having an up to date privacy policy, and only keep the data that you need and that you have permission for. However when it comes to compliance, if you get a request, be sensible. The time to lawyer up is if you get a notice from the ICO, if you think it's unreasonable and/or you don't think you can comply with it. I've dealt with the ICO quite a bit, as I've appealed a few FOI requests, and they've always been very reasonable, if a little overworked and slow to respond.

Re: Shutting Down Forum (GDPR)

#318
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're shutting down because they're privacy-ignorant and that doesn't fly in the EU any more. People apparently have a hard enough time understanding invisible things such as privacy, but this goes double for those whose income depends on violating the privacy of everyone.

Can you provide examples of websites shutting down due to GDPR ?

This is at least the 5th instance I've seen of a website announcing their closure due to GDPR on Hacker News. Most websites probably wouldn't announce it and given that a post about simply blocking all EU users got upvoted to the front page less than a week ago I doubt the idea of blocking all EU users isn't more prevalent.

https://www.polygon.com/2018/4/28/17295498/super-monday-nigh...

https://digiday.com/media/gdpr-mayhem-programmatic-ad-buying...

http://money.cnn.com/2018/05/25/media/gdpr-news-websites-la-...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/24/sites-blo...

Try doing some basic research before asking leading questions that you don't expect responses to.

Re: Shutting Down Forum (GDPR)

#319
post #33

I don't know why all these websites are shutting down due to GDPR when all you have to do is hire a competent law firm with GDPR compliance expertise to review your software and help you determine if any parts need to change to become compliant and also help you address any GDPR requests.

Even before GDPR, one could receive a DMCA request, an US court order, a letter from FBI, a letter from NSA. It didn't prevent people from creating websites though. GDPR requests are definitely less scary than a letter from NSA or an US court order: nobody will put you into jail for non-compliance, kidnap you or send a drone to you.

> Even before GDPR, one could receive a DMCA request, an US court order, a letter from FBI, a letter from NSA.

And a data access request. This has always existed, but it was a directive which was implemented in each local law, and local legislators could give (more mild) fines but almost never did.

GDPR is not new. And I'm not talking about 2016, I'm talking about the previous law from 1995 which is 95% the same for 99% of the companies.

Re: Shutting Down Forum (GDPR)

#320
post #203

How can it be hard for a forum to comply to GDPR? What kind of private information does it really need to save?

I'm a European that supports the GDPR but here's my take on the issue in the post. I don't think it would be hard for the person in the post to comply, it would just be time consuming. Say for example that a user requests a data transcript. Well he will have to collect all the post etc from that user and send it somehow. Now this is probably just a simple SQL query but it takes a bit of time, time that many people do…

It's not clear that a forum administrator would need to do anything under the GDPR except respond to emails with the standard template: "The forum does not collect or process any personal data."

Technically, I suspect, this would be true. The GDPR and the right to be forgotten are subtle on this. If a user chooses, unprompted, to share PII it's not clear that collection has taken place. Imagine a user, out of the blue, uploads her bank account information to a forum and others take the credentials and steal or her money. Would anybody seriously believe that the business should be liable for failing to secure the PII data? The other question is whether such data can be said to be processed. Clearly the forum is not processing the PII data as PII data. It's likely the case that the business doesn't know that any given forum contains PII data.

The GDPR also gives businesses a lot of lee way here. Erasure requests can be rejected under "freedom of information", if they cause undue burden a fee can be demanded, or if they're just frivolous they can be outright refused [1].

Admittedly this is speculation. European regulation is rules-based and a lot of leeway is given to regulators. The right to be forgotten is probably the least concrete aspect of the law. It's not clear how it intersects with user-generated content because it's not clear that PII is even being collected here. In the end, I suspect the regulators and the courts would probably be open to good faith efforts towards compliance. This might take the form of removing account data (username, emails, profile pictures) but leaving the forum posts up. If a specific forum post is believed to contain PII the business might ask the user to explain how the data in the post could be used to personally identify them as a data subject.

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

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