Brendan Eich Writes to the US Senate: We Need a GDPR for the United States

1) I don't agree. I prefer to have GDPR in Europe, no GDPR in the USA, and see which turns out to be better for human rights. I suspect that GDPR will very soon start to be used by corrupt politicians and other criminals who want "to be forgotten" for their misdeeds (ie, censor us when we want to remind the public).

2) I can't help but notice that GDPR is a great idea for Brave / BAT. And look: I'm long on BAT (I'm not wealthy enough to be a whale or anything, but I bought a small amount in the very early days). But this seems self-interested to me, rather than an assessment of the proper course for American politics.

Eich admits this in part, of course, saying early in the letter that "I view the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as a great leveller. The GDPR establishes the conditions that can allow young, innovative companies like Brave to flourish."

But he also says "The enormous growth of ad-blocking by people across the globe (to 615 million active devices by late 2017) proves the terrible cost of inadequately regulating the tracking-based advertising system."

Does it? It seems to me that people are working to find ways to improve their lives, and that they'll keep doing so to the shegrin of the internet behemoths absent any "regulation". In other words, the state is not needed to make this phenomenon regular - it's already quite regular and becoming moreso.

Let Brave and Chrome fight it out and the best (not the most politically expedient) one win. For now, I'm using Firefox.

I grew up with the Internet. I've been on the Internet since 1995.

The old, unregulated Internet was not made of companies milking users of data and violating their privacy.

Of course it was better.

> The internet was doing fine for decades with minimal involvement from governments - why change things?

Because the threat landscape — both malware and privacy-related — have seen a sea-change.

The internet of old was something better. Of course it was, it was full of techies, scientists and hobbyists having absurdly involved discussions on Usenet and IRC. That was before Eternal September and the rampant commercialisation, tracking and grabbing all the data possible as often as possible.

The earliest years of commercialisation were pretty good too - hundreds of small sites, all trying really hard, but all with terrible site design. :) The worst that adtech could yet come up with was an ugly animated gif and a little flash - which was super easy to block.

"Regulations like GDPR arguably make users complacent and lowers their guard"

What guard? How does a non IT expert envisage the ways that harvested data impacts their lives? Or the countless ways it can be connected up with other sources until it becomes pervasive? How are they meant to know that the news article they read has 15 different trackers on it along with the ads, or the reason some creepy retargeting ad turns up later in the day as though it knew what they were thinking?

Sometimes I wonder if _I_ know enough to take care adequately, and I've been online since before the www.

Now add the dark patterns and misinformation to completely misrepresent what most of these sites are doing with that data. Some of the big names excel at this.

"why change things?"

Facebook, Google, Microsoft and a hundred others got so greedy about data and tracking that the overreach was impossible to ignore. If GDPR wasn't already in progress, Cambridge Analytica and similar stories would have ensured it would get a reaction soon. Probably a worse reaction.

So do I. Specifically, I want to block the consent popovers and refuse consent for all but the necessary cookies and tracking.

I think the EU missed a trick by not making Do Not Track legally enforceable.