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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

#311

Post by Faark »

wolco wrote: post #69
ohduran wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Imagine if you said the same thing with taxes. "Gee, why do I have to pay taxes differently in every country?" Well, because that's what you have to do if you want to do business there. You're not forced to do anything in here if you don't want to; if the opportunity is worthy, others will take your place. Same with the laws, especially those that remove agency from the users.

But you don't. If I am from South Africa and I buy a US product from a smaller website I don't pay South Africa sales taxes. If I buy from Amazon I would because they have offices or a physical presence. When you buy a product from a website hosted/incorporated in a different country you are literally going into another country and buying a product under their laws. Your local taxes (national/stat wide/city wide) sho…

> The same should apply for eu privacy law.

Isn't there kind of an opt-out? Whenever I use a US VPN to read some non GDPR compliant website blocking EU users, I can hardly expect that law to protect me.

Thing is whatever is necessary to "literally going into another country" cannot be easy & automatically done to everyone and thus effectively allow companies to circumvent the law.

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

#312

Post by Nasrudith »

notTyler wrote: post #292
Nasrudith wrote: post #271

I can't help but view it with disgust just at the headline of having the wrong kind of mentality. It is a spiteful logical fallacy of the worst kind. "Soviets terrified of plan to nuclear first strike whole world - good!" Just because even the vilest foe dislikes it doesn't mean it is a good idea. The whole article seems to be about shutting down thinking and manipulation via playing with emotions. I am probably an o…

"Shutting down thinking." Reporting on transgressions and laws designed to hold parties accountable is designed to shut down thinking now, and how those who would be affected by it are literally trying to kill the bill is considered "shutting down thinking." This is literally what you just said.

You proved my point ironically. It is all about "punishing the bad ones for their past sins" as opposed to going forward the impact of the law - the part to actually think about. Instead straight to emotionally knee jerk driven narratives of "they are bad and must be punished" instead of what the law is actually about. See emotions come out and the thinking on the topic like "would it actually help with Cambridge Analytica 2.0" go kaput.

It is an old trick narrative for pushing terrible "tough on crime" laws for advancement. If you point out that it isn't a well thought out idea you support bad people!

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

#313

Post by thorwasdfasdf »

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…

It's pretty presumptious of people to assume that when they visit a website that it's just "their" data. The website receives the user, just as much as the user comes to the website. The data of visiting a website belongs to both the company and the user. To simply assume that it entirely belongs to the user is just wrong.

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

#314

Post by chroma »

JohnFen wrote: post #229
chroma wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this mentality. If someone is fine giving a company some information, and the company uses that to give them a better product, where is the harm? And what right do you have to stop those two parties from voluntarily exchanging goods and services?

If I am voluntarily giving information to a company, and have been completely informed of all the purposes that it will be put to (especially which companies it may be transmitted to), then I have no problem with it at all, personally. And I particularly would not be inclined to say that others can't decide this for themselves. The problem is the rampant data collection that is engaged in without my permission and/or…

OK so if I understand you, you are worried that companies are collecting data on people and then using that data to give them more personalized ads. These ads may convince people to buy or do things that they otherwise wouldn't. It's not just that people would buy Chevys instead of Fords. They could be convinced to vote differently and support harmful policies.

I hope that's an accurate summary of your view.

I have a few points.

First, I don't think targeted advertising is much more effective than your typical magazine ad, TV commercial, radio ad, or movie trailer. In all of those cases, the advertisers know the demographics of who is consuming that media and can target pretty effectively. And if targeting was far more effective than old school ads, advertisers would pay significantly more for targeted ads, but they don't seem to. CPC for Facebook and Twitter is about the same (~50 cents), despite one allowing for much more fine-grained targeting. And I doubt LinkedIn does better targeting than Facebook, but LinkedIn's CPC is 10x higher.

Second, is this an instrumental value or a terminal value for you? eg: If all advertising were banned (or at least heavily taxed), would you no longer want a ban on companies storing customers information? If so, I'd like to hear why.

Third, what if we could pass laws that caused the benefits of targeted ads to outweigh the downsides? For example: We could ban targeting for politics. Then people could still get ads for more things they want, such as some software that would help them or some new barbershop that opened near them. That seems like a win-win to me.

Lastly, whenever I see an argument between to sides, I pay attention to emotions. In my experience, the less emotional side tends to be the more correct one. If a side mostly engages using disgust, anger, and catastrophizing, I get very suspicious. If I had to pick the more emotional side in this thread, it would definitely be the side that accuses the other of, "violating basic human decency", of being "horribly unethical", and doing "stupid privacy violating shit". On the other side, pretty much everyone against this law seems to think it's mistaken, not evil.

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

#315

Post by oarabbus_ »

buboard wrote: post #252
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…

except, the full sentence in the bill reads: > including by charging the consumer who opts out a different price or providing the consumer a different quality of goods or services, except if the difference is reasonably related to value provided by the consumer’s dat Doesnt that second part cancel the first part? Businesses can also pay money for data ... so facebook can switch to subsciption only, but pay its users…

>so facebook can switch to subsciption only

sure, if it wanted to fall out of the fortune 500.

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

#316

Post by domnomnom »

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…

Every state will end up having a different law like this, and it will be terrible adhering to each one.

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

#317

Post by edmundsauto »

caconym_ wrote: post #272
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…

At least in America we already restrict certain types of transactions, e.g. selling illegal and/or restricted drugs is itself generally illegal IIRC. Similarly I'm pretty sure slavery is illegal even if it's entered into voluntarily (please correct me if I'm wrong there, I'm not speaking from specific knowledge). We impose these restrictions for the good of the public. If we decide that exchanging personal data for g…

There's significant pushback against the restricted drugs thing, so that might not be the best comparison.

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

#318

Post by laughinghan »

bcheung wrote: post #132
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…

Some problematic scenarios: - How do you identify what is customer data? There may be information stored in logs somewhere. Do you now have to write log parsers to extract personal data for everything that previously you just stored for general debugging and security purposes? How do you even know all the permutations of personal data that came be stored in the logs. There are possibly infinite possible ways personal…

Do you now have to write log parsers to extract personal data for everything that previously you just stored for general debugging and security purposes? ... Any engineers now must fully understand the consequences of anything they log and design delete mechanisms for it.

YES YES YES YES YES.

Are you not already doing this for passwords, credit card numbers, and social security numbers?

Such a request is essentially NP-complete.

I think you mean undecidable, or equivalent to the halting problem, or subject to Rice's theorem. NP-completeness is irrelevant. I think you'll find that HN is the last place you'll win arguments by inaccurately using technical terms in the hopes that it will go over other people's heads, Legally Blonde-style (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rNVaY7Stt4).

To anyone who knows what they're talking about, this an obviously nonsensical argument. It's similarly undecidable to verify whether the data that you expose publicly contains customer data, or customer passwords, or your own passwords, but you do it anyway, by restricting your engineers to only write and deploy code that they understand.

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

#319

Post by chobeat »

DanBC wrote: post #193
chobeat wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude, GDPR's effects just began. Give it time. A sudden enforcement of GDPR would destroy too many business and so it's being enforced gradually. Still, there are beginning to discuss the complete outlaw of the real time bidding in adtech because completely incompatible with the GDPR. That means destroying bilions of dollars of businesses, so they go slow until there's enough political consensus to do so without fear…

You know that GDPR is just a refinement of ideas that began over 20 years ago, right? The EU really isn't engaged in a three decade campaign to destroy American companies. Two nice timelines: https://edps.europa.eu/data-protection/data-protection/legis... https://iapp.org/resources/article/a-brief-history-of-the-ge...

Sure I do know, but these processes take time. And don't frame EU as a singular entity, there are many interestes involved.

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

#320

Post by SilasX »

m463 wrote: post #273
jakelazaroff wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The entire premise of free exchange is that I give you my services in exchange for something of value of yours. "Something" doesn't mean "anything". You can't offer your services in exchange for e.g. my body parts. Why are we willing to ban that but not our data? > The only reason those services are being provided at all is to get that data. That's effectively a requirement that people provide services for free. We…

There's also the dilemma that if you pay for something with a credit card, you have to identify yourself.

Only as an artifact of how laws currently work, not a necessary aspect of how transactions have to work.

We could definitely have a system where eg all CC processing must be done through a firewalled system such that the business only ever learns that the payment was successful (unless there is a dispute).

Edit: Europe tries to approximate this with the GDPR system of “you can only use information for the purposes for which it was collected” but that doesn’t stop them from seeing your identity like I described.

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