121–130 of 211 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You may be interested in http://prebake.eu/ to block them.
"By using these filters, you are allowing sites to set cookies by default, without you first being notified, and are agreeing to allow the sites you visit to set cookies." Does lack of interaction with a (blocked) cookie banner give implicit consent to be tracked?
In my network of friends, which is within the EU and comprised entirely of EU citizens and spans multiple EU tech companies from dinky startups to Giant Unicorn, GDPR has been almost universally approved. We had to implement it, and generally feel better for having done so. The Giant Unicorn employees were dismayed by how little time they were given for such a giant task, but were in support of the law. Everybody is…
I disagree with the GDPR "success story" part of your comment. So far it's backfired entirely. The goal was to provide users with more control, and (from the standpoint of such a user) to reduce relentless personal data harvesting. That hasn't happened. What's happened is more annoying "we use cookies and track you"-banners all over the internet. As a user who doesn't use cookies, these damned things won't even go aw…
So, it's just one more paper to sign, and doesn't help the actual consumer. I would have expected more of "Don't send me any promotional/survey questions unless I opt in", or "Never share my data with 3rd parties, period".
It's super interesting to watch the reaction of the US blogosphere to EU laws. I feel like I'm learning a lot about US culture just by observing the general attitude that seems to be coalescing against things like GDPR. I used to think that I'd been pretty well indoctrinated into the US value system, despite being born in the EU, just by virtue of having most of my influences (movies, the internet) having come from t…
Be careful about assuming too much consistency in the US populace. I'm born-and-raised US, and our attitudes can be very hard to describe. We'll hate "Obamacare" but actually support all the individual parts. We'll complain about govt spending then complain when the govt doesn't function. We'll complain that people don't trust science about global warming but avoid vaccines and expect GMOs to actually mutate us. We'l…
It's actually not that hard. You can have a mexican restaurant, hibachi restaurant, cajun restaurant and winery all in the same city and patronize a different one each day. That's the benefit of diversity.
What doing it wrong looks like is accusing the mexican restaurant of a moral failing because their staff is mostly latino, or the winery because their staff is mostly English or French. You don't maintain diverse cultures by requiring every place to be formed of exact proportions of statistically precise homogenized diversity paste, you get them by having clumps of different cultures near each other that trade and learn with each other while continuing to possess their own discrete cultural identities.
All unity requires is coexisting without fighting each other.
The fact that some people do it wrong doesn't mean there isn't a way to do it right.
And that's also why you see people on both sides of any given issue. A diverse country does not have a homogeneous people.
In my network of friends, which is within the EU and comprised entirely of EU citizens and spans multiple EU tech companies from dinky startups to Giant Unicorn, GDPR has been almost universally approved. We had to implement it, and generally feel better for having done so. The Giant Unicorn employees were dismayed by how little time they were given for such a giant task, but were in support of the law. Everybody is…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it ok to say "you get a discount if you allow being tracked"? As a practical matter, these places need to earn money to exist, so either you get served ads or you pay directly. It's highly unreasonable to expect free service.
And the GDPR says "good riddance to you if you can only make money by tracking people without the tracking itself being part of your value to them". Not all business models deserve to succeed.
The most likely outcome will be a distorted market in Europe and European tech companies becoming even less relevant and even less able to compete in other regions of the world.
So there's a lot of coverage about the EU parliament process, but where did the drive for this copyright directive come from? There seems to very little coverage on how this directive came about. Whose interests are being represented by these changes?
It's super interesting to watch the reaction of the US blogosphere to EU laws. I feel like I'm learning a lot about US culture just by observing the general attitude that seems to be coalescing against things like GDPR. I used to think that I'd been pretty well indoctrinated into the US value system, despite being born in the EU, just by virtue of having most of my influences (movies, the internet) having come from t…
I also found the reaction interesting because even techies here were overwhelmingly in favour of GDPR. Mainly because it is so similar to data protection that's been in place for 20 years and they have been used to implementing without problem. That included founders and executives within companies. Thanks to the profile of people I know that's been mainly in smaller companies. Most of the negative opinion I heard wa…
It's super interesting to watch the reaction of the US blogosphere to EU laws. I feel like I'm learning a lot about US culture just by observing the general attitude that seems to be coalescing against things like GDPR. I used to think that I'd been pretty well indoctrinated into the US value system, despite being born in the EU, just by virtue of having most of my influences (movies, the internet) having come from t…
My perception and view of the US and it's culture also slightly shifted after GDPR came into spotlight (same conclusions as yours). Just the other day I ended up in a discussion with a US citizen (it started completely harmless and away from culture/politics) and ended up in the same corner: "EU is bad because it limits your freedom, US is great because it gives you freedom". The problem is - the argument (my underst…
In limiting businesses more in the EU I found out that it generally means less competition and fewer companies (per capita) than the US, in my limited experience of having lived in the EU most of my life before moving to the US and still visiting Europe every year. One of the most common shocks of moving to the US from Europe is the sheer number of options/choices that you have/can make for every little thing. Back in Europe there was 1-2 supermarket chains, here there are much more. Same for food (fast or otherwise), insurance agencies, banks/credit unions, broker services, pension funds plus countless small stores (not national chains). In most interactions I have in the US I really do feel that "the customer is always right" (there are lots of exceptions to that rule but you will generally see those exceptions also happen because of lack of competition) while in Europe most of the interactions I had as a customer meant I would have to either beg for something or get angry about it/make a scene in order to make progress on an issue.
There are also deeper cultural differences in criteria customers use to pick one company or the other. In the US people seem more willing to vote with their wallets and do not look back while I feel much less of that happening in Europe.
It's hard of course to generalize across such large and varied populations and economies but this has been my experience and it does align with logical explanations of consequences of limiting businesses more or less in a free market environment.