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Silicon Valley is terrified of California’s privacy law

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Re: Silicon Valley is terrified of California’s privacy law

#211

Post by mattnewton »

joshklein wrote: post #207
darawk wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - Consumers can opt out of their data being sold, and businesses can’t retaliate by changing the price or level of service. This is something I object to. It's just fundamentally stupid and doesn't make sense. The entire premise of free exchange is that I give you my services in exchange for something of value of yours. Making it illegal to withhold services if you don't give up your data is crazy. The only reason…

Charging different customers a different price for the same product is illegal under US law, and California laws don’t change that. EDIT: Several comments below point out the innumerable businesses operating in such a way as to make mine an impossible claim. Enumerating the established methods to avoid meeting the legal parameters of price discrimination is not the same as price discrimination being legal. My bar for…

This is suprising to me. I assume it is much more nuanced than that? How does insurance work then? Isn't insurance fundimentally the same plan with different prices for different groups depending on assessed risk?

Re: Silicon Valley is terrified of California’s privacy law

#212

Post by matthewmcg »

joshklein wrote: post #207
darawk wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - Consumers can opt out of their data being sold, and businesses can’t retaliate by changing the price or level of service. This is something I object to. It's just fundamentally stupid and doesn't make sense. The entire premise of free exchange is that I give you my services in exchange for something of value of yours. Making it illegal to withhold services if you don't give up your data is crazy. The only reason…

Charging different customers a different price for the same product is illegal under US law, and California laws don’t change that. EDIT: Several comments below point out the innumerable businesses operating in such a way as to make mine an impossible claim. Enumerating the established methods to avoid meeting the legal parameters of price discrimination is not the same as price discrimination being legal. My bar for…

That's not generally true. Businesses are free to vary their pricing provided they aren't violating some other law in doing so (e.g. laws prohibiting discrimination based on race or sex or laws requiring common carriers or utilities to charge prices set on a tariff).

Re: Silicon Valley is terrified of California’s privacy law

#213

Post by IfOnlyYouKnew »

throawayuk55po wrote: post #91
exar0815 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is manifestly bullshit. When I as an Engineer build a physical product, I have to take care that it fulfills the legal and normative requirements of every place I plan to sell it. The product of a software company is said software. The "storefront" is their website. When I cater to a global audience, I have to make sure I fulfill all requirements. Period. No matter what I sell. Now, there are ways around it. Eit…

Why do you have to respect national norms? Because there will be health and safety implications within their country. In the case of visiting a website, the customer is the one visiting you, there is no good rational to put the burden on the business. It is much more sound and natural to either put it on the consumer, a business may be visited by nationals from hundreds of juridisction, while a consumer will only vis…

It's a myth that the internet is about "information" that has no power to do any harm. Anything that can be beneficial must, by definition, have the power to change whatever you consider reality, and almost that power can have negative consequences as well as positive ones.

Here, we're talking data and privacy, and it's commonly accepted fact that the disclosure of personal data can be harmful. Countries want to protect their citizen from such harms. Hence regulation.

> , there is no good rational to put the burden on the business. It is much more sound and natural to either put it on the consumer, a business may be visited by nationals from hundreds of juridisction, while a consumer will only visit 1 or 2 businesses

This seems completely, and obviously, be the opposite of reality as I experience it, as both a consumer and startup founder. Businesses have repeated transactions of similar types and products. Since there are fewer businesses than consumers, they also have more resources, and locating any burdens of transactions that occur once per country is vastly more efficient.

A company like Facebook has a theoretical upper limit of a little less than 200 jurisdictions to consider, using billions in revenue. Their customers would have to the same, only they number in the billions, and have few resources nor structures for sharing this burden (except, of course, their governments).

> while a consumer will only visit 1 or 2 businesses.

I'm pretty sure I interact with dozens of businesses every day.

Re: Silicon Valley is terrified of California’s privacy law

#214

Post by 1000units »

jredwards wrote: post #205
1000units wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good laws put bad people out of business. I don't see the issue here.

The reason there are so many wonderful services available for free is because they make money selling your data. If the service is free, the product is you. For many, many people, that is _fine_. The real issue I see here is how this law is written and how we're interpreting it. If the law makes it so that people who want to opt out of free internet services because of privacy concerns are free to do so, then we're a…

The problem is these services are scams. If people understood what they were doing they wouldn't trade their data for $5/month.

If your business can't survive by charging a fair price for the service it provides without stealing data, then it shouldn't exist.

Re: Silicon Valley is terrified of California’s privacy law

#215

Post by paulmd »

pitaj wrote: post #209
paulmd wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Someone passed a bad law once, therefore all laws are bad." Guess we don't need food safety laws anymore, prohibition was bad! Surely you can understand the difference between prohibition and consumer-protection laws? They aren't even like, the same field of laws.

No, the point is that it's important to address and control for all of the consequences of policy - including the unintended ones.

Sure, but then you need to demonstrate real (not just imagined) harm. GDPR doesn't seem to have caused the world to end. Vanishingly few people actually followed through on the whining and quit serving the EU.

From the perspective of ordinary users, GDPR was a pretty successful law with no real downsides. Businesses have to be more careful with data, that's about it.

Re: Silicon Valley is terrified of California’s privacy law

#216

Post by mdavidn »

paggle wrote: post #179
nabnob wrote: post #52

I see a lot of comments deriding this law, can someone explain to me why these are bad things? Quoting from this article - https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/28/landmark-california-privac... - Businesses must disclose what information they collect, what business purpose they do so for and any third parties they share that data with. - Businesses would be required to comply with official consumer requests to delete that d…

Regulations that don’t achieve anything create a massive drag on innovation and commerce. Every regulation is a compliance check that needs to be paid for, a lawyer that needs to be hired, etc. which advantages incumbents. It’s like lines of code in a program — each one makes the application worse, so each one should have a purpose that it achieves.

The law would not be necessary if companies were upfront with how they collect and process information about individual consumers. Now this is a compromise many consumers want.

Re: Silicon Valley is terrified of California’s privacy law

#218

Post by ashelmire »

lacampbell wrote: post #170
dangus wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the flip side, the downsides of regulations don’t outweigh their utility. We don’t scrap seatbelt and airbag regulations just because they’ve had some unintended side effects. Regulations aren’t set in stone forever, either, and a functional legislative body can always modify and update them as their effects become more well known. Or, well, maybe I sound too idealistic. But...I think most of us can all agree that…

The US scrapped alcohol prohibition due to its unintended side effects, and is increasingly scrapping marijuana prohibitions. Often the downsides do outweigh their utility.

Did you miss the part where the individual you responded to said "Regulations aren’t set in stone forever, either, and a functional legislative body can always modify and update them as their effects become more well known."?

There is over regulation in some areas, but lets be real: it's already extremely difficult to break into existing sectors, just as a result of industrialization, brand recognition, etc. The idea of the scrappy upstart is overwhelmingly a fantasy. This regulation won't prevent any businesses worth forming from getting underway, in my opinion.

Re: Silicon Valley is terrified of California’s privacy law

#219

Post by novok »

exar0815 wrote: post #25
throawayuk55po wrote: post #16

We need to have a conversation about jurisdictions in the digital age. The way governments have decided that having a website accessible in a country makes you liable to respect the law of this country is a convulted and hacky notion that has been accepted way too fast. The physical establishment rule was the only sound approach. The fact that some countries started to lose shouldn't have allowed them to rewrite the…

This is manifestly bullshit. When I as an Engineer build a physical product, I have to take care that it fulfills the legal and normative requirements of every place I plan to sell it. The product of a software company is said software. The "storefront" is their website. When I cater to a global audience, I have to make sure I fulfill all requirements. Period. No matter what I sell. Now, there are ways around it. Eit…

I think a good metaphor to think about this is how a book store in new york will be visited by people from hundreds of countries, where some of the products they sell there are illegal in some countries because of obscenity laws.

If the EU made a law that made the NYC bookstore liable in the EU for selling "obscene" books to europeans, and then arrested the unaware bookstore owner in a vacation to france, is that really right?

That is a big issue with the GDPR in general.

Re: Silicon Valley is terrified of California’s privacy law

#220

Post by notfromhere »

morganherlocker wrote: post #75

Lot's of (mis)information floating around regarding CCPA. I recommend taking the time to read the actual text[1]. The text is not particularly long or dense. There has been a lot of speculation about complex compliance procedures, but the main thrust of the bill is to provide users with information about how their data is collected, who it is shared with, and the rights to prevent certain types of selling or sharing…

The main problem is that the bill is rushed and the legal bits have a lot of ambiguity.

source: CCPA and its potential compliance has been a big PITA

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