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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

#481

Post by briandear »

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…

Airplane tickets. Car rental rates. Hotel rates. Buying a car. Loans: if I want to borrow $100k for 10 years, I will pay a different price than my next door neighbor asking for the same terms.

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

#482

Post by abacadaba »

DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #144
mattbee wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

European here, I can help: Yes a click counts as personal data if you can reference it back to a real person. Aggregated clicks probably wouldn't. Selling ads based on personal data is selling your personal data. The personal data provides the value to the transaction. Yes lots of companies may need new business models, but for the most part what I've seen is dark patterns, non compliance or wriggling to avoid any re…

It's interesting to know what those terms mean in Europe's GDPR, but I'm not sure that will affect their interpretation in the U.S. court system.

> but for the most part what I've seen is dark patterns, non compliance or wriggling to avoid any real change.

I fully expect this part to be just as relevant over here

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

#483

Post by briandear »

mfer wrote: post #232
jredwards wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> For many, many people, that is _fine_. I would argue this isn't the case. For many people it is out of sight and out of mind. They don't realize what's happening. I came to this conclusion after talking with people about it. Numerous people didn't believe it. I had to show people documents and articles for them to believe me. Most of the people I've spoken with do not like this behavior and would rather not use a s…

> The average person is unaware. That does not make it ok.

Any actual data other than anecdotes?

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

#484

Post by briandear »

evilantnie wrote: post #177
Jach wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Washington and this is the last year I'll have to do emissions testing for my vehicle registration. I'm still kind of amazed (my default is pessimism) that this was put into motion in 2005 and nothing seems to be in the way of stopping the removal of the requirement next year: https://ecology.wa.gov/Air-Climate/Air-quality/Vehicle-emiss... My only point is to support your case that it's not always idealisti…

I was also surprised by this when I first saw it, but if you read the reasoning behind the ending of the program, it kind of makes sense. It sounds like they are just switching their focus. The emissions check program is aimed at carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, and particulate pollution. Properly functioning emissions systems ensure a vehicle operates efficiently, but the effect on a car…

Carbon isn’t pollution. Particulates and smog are. This is ridiculous that they end testing for pollution that can actually kill people in favor of focusing on CO2 which is necessary for life on earth to survive.

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

#485

Post by alxlaz »

tylerl wrote: post #462
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 makes it extremely difficult to legally be a tech firm unless you're already a tech giant, just like the FDAs procedures make it impossible to invent a new drug unless you're already an established, giant pharma company. None of the big names in tech will have any trouble at all complying with this; I'd be very surprised if any at all are not already compliant today. At the same time, the percentage of tech startu…

> It makes it extremely difficult to legally be a tech firm unless you're already a tech giant

Why? There are plenty of tech companies that collect very little data, and don't sell any of it. I fondly remember one of my customers telling me how much effort it took to come up with a wordy enough privacy policy page for one of their products so that it wouldn't look suspicious. The first draft was barely two paragraphs long and contained just a couple of items, most of them ephemeral (e.g. IP addresses, which were collected only for logging purposes and were only stored for 30 days).

If a company is unable to even articulate what data it collects and cannot do basic operations on it (e.g. remove a piece of it), then it shouldn't be in the business of handling personal information. The same way a clinic that can't even keep track of blood samples shouldn't be in business.

And if a company's earnings depend strictly on being able to collect and sell personal data, what they need is a better business plan, not having everyone turn a blind eye.

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

#486

Post by Despegar »

tylerl wrote: post #462
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 makes it extremely difficult to legally be a tech firm unless you're already a tech giant, just like the FDAs procedures make it impossible to invent a new drug unless you're already an established, giant pharma company. None of the big names in tech will have any trouble at all complying with this; I'd be very surprised if any at all are not already compliant today. At the same time, the percentage of tech startu…

>just like the FDAs procedures make it impossible to invent a new drug unless you're already an established, giant pharma company.

This is complete nonsense. The biotech industry is very large and vibrant and are most certainly not Big Pharma.

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

#487

Post by alxlaz »

bmistree wrote: post #478
tylerl wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes it extremely difficult to legally be a tech firm unless you're already a tech giant, just like the FDAs procedures make it impossible to invent a new drug unless you're already an established, giant pharma company. None of the big names in tech will have any trouble at all complying with this; I'd be very surprised if any at all are not already compliant today. At the same time, the percentage of tech startu…

I just wanted to piggy-back onto the parent’s comment with a concrete example. I’ve always been told that it’s good practice to take periodic backups. In the absolute worst cases, you can simply restore directly from these. If a customer requests that their data are deleted, in addition to my production instance, does that mean that I have to remove their data from my backups? If so, I’m uncertain of the best way to…

Not sure about the legal framework in the US but over here across the pond, it's enough if you remove the data when restoring the backups (reasonably easy to do; took me about a day to implement that on an old codebase that I wrote more than ten years ago, and I haven't touched either PHP or that codebase since then...).

IANAL but the guy who told us how it's done was, and in addition to all the legal stuff, of which I have absolutely no recollection because I don't really understand it, he pointed us to this as a useful resource for people who are also not lawyers: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio... .

Turns out it's acceptable for data to remain backed up for a while (as long as you inform your users), as long as you have systems in place that guarantees it's not used anymore.

Just sayin, it's not rocket science. Reading Internet forums you'd think the GDPR was like Apocalypse Lite, but in my experience, it took very little effort to implement it for companies that weren't engaging in shady practices.

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

#489

Post by lagadu »

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…

I've no idea how it works in SA but if I buy anything outside my market, I'll be paying customs for importing it. So yes, my local taxes still matter.

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

#490

Post by lagadu »

hartator wrote: post #58
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…

Agreed. A good rule of thumb is the law applicable is where your HQ is located. Or you have to come up with good reasons why US companies shouldn't comply with the Chinese gov but should with EU ones.

No company has to comply with laws of jurisdictions they're not based on. Unless they want to be allowed to conduct business there, that is.
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