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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

#331

Post by d1zzy »

m-p-3 wrote: post #263
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…

You just have to change the onboarding process to include a fee, and offer an incentive/rebate of the subscription price to match the cost to basically make it free. That way if they decide to change their mind and not give their data, you're still in the clear by removing the incentive and either charge their payment method or disable their service until they do (or reenable data sharing). That way it feels more tra…

> You just have to change the onboarding process to include a fee, and offer an incentive/rebate of the subscription price to match the cost to basically make it free. That way if they decide to change their mind and not give their data, you're still in the clear by removing the incentive and either charge their payment method or disable their service until they do (or reenable data sharing).

The problem is that then you cannot effectively offer a service level that is ad based. Say I want to offer some web services. I provide a free tier with ads (information gathering and selling) and a payed tier with no ads. This law says that I cannot charge more for the non-ads version. OK, so then I make both cost the same, either free or some fixed cost. If they are both free, what stops everyone from just using the non-ads version, it's free too. If both aren't free and cost money, what is the point of even providing the ad version, since people can pay the same and get the no-ads version. Not to mention, everyone that is fine giving their information in order to receive the service for "free" is now not able to do that.

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

#332

Post by d1zzy »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #256
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…

> 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…

> "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?

Because if you were to run a survey over the general population the large majority is fine not having to pay for gmail, google search, maps and other "free" services while some data may be collected doing so while a much smaller percentage thinks it's OK to sell their organs for that?

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

#333

Post by bduerst »

laughinghan wrote: post #329
bduerst wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GP is referring to pseudonymization, not data structures. Logs that do not contain explicit PII are still rife with pseudo-identifiers that could possibly (but not typically) be used to join activity with PII. For example: - You have one set of logs that stores anonymized click activity - You have another set of logs that stores purchase transactions - Both have millisecond timestamps You could potentially link the c…

Yes. Emplify, for example, makes it a point not to reveal averaged responses for subgroups of size less than 5, for similar reasons: https://intercom.help/emplify-insights/en/articles/1731829-c... We should be making an effort to take such care with all customer data, even just when storing it. Mistakes are inevitable, of course, so small gaps that are soon fixed should be let off with a warning, with any fines propo…

That is not how logs work. Did you reply to the right comment?

Exemplify is gating database records from surfacing through their UI. These records still exist in the database and are admin accessible. The act of knowing if clustering the data is too much still requires knowing the data - i.e. the data existing.

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

#334

Post by aetherson »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #301
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…

> The entire premise of free exchange is that I give you my services in exchange for something of value of yours. Not if the thing I value is my personal data. Because I, as a typical short sighted consumer, will consistently underestimate the value of my data, as well as how my data affects those around me (extreme case: my data is my social graph, which you can use to reconstruct the social graph of my acquaintance…

You used the first person pronoun a lot there. Do you yourself actually feel that you are short-sighted and that you consistently underestimate the value of your data? Or are you putting yourself in the place of a hypothetical other person?

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

#335

Post by baddox »

FussyZeus wrote: post #23
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…

> 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. You know if you turn that around and say "How come we have to respect the laws of every country we do business in?" it sounds a lot more self servi…

> If you're intending to serve any product to an entire planet composed of nations, states, societies all pulling from different experiences, different cultural attitudes, I think expecting a completely friction-free experience in doing so is more than a little unreasonable.

Is it so unreasonable? Given that the Internet essentially solves the problem of technically doing this, perhaps it is in fact the laws which are unreasonable.

Your statement isn't so different from saying "it's unreasonable to expect to be able to have a nearly-instant audio conversation with virtually anyone on the planet for very little cost." I would give the same response: that no, that's really not that unreasonable given that the technical problems are essentially solved, and if there are laws preventing that, perhaps the laws are unreasonable.

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

#336

Post by fedorareis »

d1zzy wrote: post #331
m-p-3 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just have to change the onboarding process to include a fee, and offer an incentive/rebate of the subscription price to match the cost to basically make it free. That way if they decide to change their mind and not give their data, you're still in the clear by removing the incentive and either charge their payment method or disable their service until they do (or reenable data sharing). That way it feels more tra…

> You just have to change the onboarding process to include a fee, and offer an incentive/rebate of the subscription price to match the cost to basically make it free. That way if they decide to change their mind and not give their data, you're still in the clear by removing the incentive and either charge their payment method or disable their service until they do (or reenable data sharing). The problem is that then…

You can still have ads you just can’t sell the users data to get them. Which means you either have to target ads yourself or you have to use non targeted ads. So you can still have an ad supported free level.

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

#337

Post by laughinghan »

bduerst wrote: post #333
laughinghan wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Emplify, for example, makes it a point not to reveal averaged responses for subgroups of size less than 5, for similar reasons: https://intercom.help/emplify-insights/en/articles/1731829-c... We should be making an effort to take such care with all customer data, even just when storing it. Mistakes are inevitable, of course, so small gaps that are soon fixed should be let off with a warning, with any fines propo…

That is not how logs work. Did you reply to the right comment? Exemplify is gating database records from surfacing through their UI. These records still exist in the database and are admin accessible. The act of knowing if clustering the data is too much still requires knowing the data - i.e. the data existing.

Yes, I replied to the right comment, you're getting hung up on an irrelevant detail.

I'm saying that the thought they put into anonymizing the data they surfaced through their UI, that same amount of thought should be put into the data we all store.

If the data can't be clustered in a way that preserves anonymity, it should be deleted (after the desired aggregate statistics are computed). Emplify probably isn't required to, and so they probably don't. I'm saying they should be required to.

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

#338

Post by 19ylram49 »

dangus wrote: post #118
mahmoudimus wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the idea is that regulation always has unexpected side effects, some of which can be abused to actually do the perverse inverse of what they're intended to protect against. This is intuitive because regulation + law can really put a competitive barrier for established incumbents who (and arguably, they would be the target for lawsuits here) have resources to implement and comply with these regulations. The la…

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…

> But...I think most of us can all agree that consumer data protections are highly lacking.

Yup. Especially here in the U.S.

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

#339

Post by narrator »

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…

Good way to make sure all companies support scrubbing of evidence of crimes so wikileaks or government investigators can't get at the evidence.

Basically Hillary's private email server getting bleachbitted, but for everyone now. Makes running an organized crime gang, political corruption graft ring or chinese espionage ring much easier. Same with banning facial recognition. Makes getting away with crime a lot easier than it would otherwise be. If you are a corrupt politician, this is really important stuff.

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

#340

Post by aliveupstairs »

whatshisface wrote: post #309
m463 wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if that will have unintended consequences. It might inadvertently assign a price to the data collected. It also shows a direct discrimination against poor and/or young people who might not afford the service.

> It also shows a direct discrimination against poor and/or young people who might not afford the service. As opposed to what, treating everybody badly? McDonalds discriminates between people who can afford a Big Mac and people who can't, and that's not a problem.

The internet is not the same as a food place. People expect and have gotten used to services for free. If you put a price tag on a software library, you obviously discriminate against students and poor people.
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