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Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

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Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#31

Post by norman784 »

zdragnar wrote: post #19
rpastuszak wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why this is being downvoted?

The premise is that the intent of the law was good, so everyone should naturally change their behavior to obey the spirit of the law. That isn't how people work. The law was poorly written and even more poorly enforced. Attempts at "compliance" made the web browsing experience worse.

The implementors of the banners did it in the most annoying way, so most users will just accept all instead of rejecting all (because the button to reject all was hidden or not there at all), check steam store for example their banner is non intrusive and you can clearly reject or accept all in one click.

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#32

Post by weberer »

rpastuszak wrote: post #14
jonesjohnson wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the issue was never the law. the issue were the 100s of tracking cookies and that websites would use dark patterns or simply not offer a "no to all" button at all (which is against the law, btw.) Most websites do. not. need. cookies. It's all about tracking and surveillance to show you different prices on airbnb and booking.com to maximise their profits. https://noyb.eu/en/project/cookie-banners (edit: link)

I'm not sure why this is being downvoted?

Because the issue is due to a failure in the law. The failure of not enforcing the "do not track" setting from browsers that would avoid the need for these annoying pop-ups in the first place.

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#33

Post by GardenLetter27 »

__loam wrote: post #28
bitpush wrote: post #16

Incredible to see the 180 both from EU and also from the HN sentiment. HN was cheering on as EU went after Big Tech companies, especially Meta. Meta is no perfect company, but the amount of 'please stick it to them' was strong (I reckon that is still a bridge too far for a lot of folks here). Even extreme proponents of big tech villanery in the US (Lina Khan's FTC) is also facing losses (They just lost their monument…

It's pretty telling that people here think enforcement of anti-trust laws that are already on the books is "extreme". The implicit goal of half of tech startups is basically becoming the platform for whatever and getting a soft monopoly, so I guess it's not surprising that that people who are temporarily embarrassed monopolists have these views.

Look at what happened to iRobot vs. Roborock though.

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#34

Post by theptip »

> users would be able to control others from central browser controls that apply to websites broadly.

Great to see this finally. It’s obviously the way it should have been implemented from the beginning.

We still see this technically myopic approach with things like age verification; it’s insane to ask websites to collect Gov ID to age verify kids (or prove adulthood for porn), rather than having an OS feature that can do so in a privacy-preserving way. Now these sites have a copy of your ID! You know they are going to get hacked and leak it!

(Parents should opt their kids phones into “kid mode” and this would block age-sensitive content. The law just needs to mandate that this mode is respected by sites/apps.)

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#35

Post by radicalbyte »

bitpush wrote: post #16

Incredible to see the 180 both from EU and also from the HN sentiment. HN was cheering on as EU went after Big Tech companies, especially Meta. Meta is no perfect company, but the amount of 'please stick it to them' was strong (I reckon that is still a bridge too far for a lot of folks here). Even extreme proponents of big tech villanery in the US (Lina Khan's FTC) is also facing losses (They just lost their monument…

There has been a change in the community here over the last decade, we've lost a lot of the hacker spirit and have a larger proportion of "chancers", people who are only in tech to "get rich quick". The legacy of ZIRP combined with The Social Network marketing.

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#36

Post by yardie »

bitpush wrote: post #16

Incredible to see the 180 both from EU and also from the HN sentiment. HN was cheering on as EU went after Big Tech companies, especially Meta. Meta is no perfect company, but the amount of 'please stick it to them' was strong (I reckon that is still a bridge too far for a lot of folks here). Even extreme proponents of big tech villanery in the US (Lina Khan's FTC) is also facing losses (They just lost their monument…

I believe the FTC had a case years ago. But the market has moved on. YT took off backed by Alphabet capital. Tiktok took off withe Bytedance capital. There was a time when FB/IG/WA commanded most of social media. And Meta did use that clout in some pretty grotesque ways.

Prior to 2020, FTC would have had a much stronger case. But too little too late.

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#37

Post by bpodgursky »

yardie wrote: post #24
bpodgursky wrote: post #7

> The EU folds under Big Tech’s pressure. This is a very odd framing, because the actual reason from quotes in the article is that the EU is acutely feeling the pain of having no big tech companies , due in part to burdensome privacy regulations. The pressure isn't really from big tech, it's from feeling poor and setting themselves up as irrelevant consumers of an economy permeated by AI.

> due in part to burdensome privacy regulations. A large part is due to their approach to startup investing and chronic undercapitalization. GDPR is coming up 10 years now and the worries about it were overblown. What hasn't budged is Europe is very fiscally conservative on technology. Unless it's coming from their big corporations it's very hard to get funding. Everyone wants the same thing, a sure bet.

I think this is a very rosy framing.

GDPR showed that once you are a ten-billion dollar company, your compliance team can manage GDPR enough to enter the market. For a startup, starting in the EU or entering the EU early is still extremely difficult because the burdens do not scale linearly with size.

This means that yes, US tech giants can sell into the EU, but the EU will never get their own domestic tech giants because they simply cannot get off the ground there.

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#38

Post by kmeisthax »

bitpush wrote: post #16

Incredible to see the 180 both from EU and also from the HN sentiment. HN was cheering on as EU went after Big Tech companies, especially Meta. Meta is no perfect company, but the amount of 'please stick it to them' was strong (I reckon that is still a bridge too far for a lot of folks here). Even extreme proponents of big tech villanery in the US (Lina Khan's FTC) is also facing losses (They just lost their monument…

> What I really want to see is Meta getting irrelevant ON MERIT.

That happened a decade ago. Users dropped from Facebook like flies and moved to Instagram. Mark Zuckerberg's response was to buy Instagram. The Obama DOJ waved through what was obviously a blatantly illegal merger.

Likewise, Google's only ever made two successful products: Search and e-mail. Everything else was an acquisition. In fact, Google controlled so much of the M&A market that YCombinator (the company that runs this forum) complained in an amicus brief that they were basically being turned into Google's farm league.

So long as companies can be bought and sold to larger competitors, no tech company will ever become irrelevant. They'll just acquire and rebrand. The only way to stop this is with the appropriate application of legal force.

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#39

Post by ElectricalUnion »

theptip wrote: post #34

> users would be able to control others from central browser controls that apply to websites broadly. Great to see this finally. It’s obviously the way it should have been implemented from the beginning. We still see this technically myopic approach with things like age verification; it’s insane to ask websites to collect Gov ID to age verify kids (or prove adulthood for porn), rather than having an OS feature that c…

That was what P3P was supposed to enforce automatically for you, until Google ruined it for everyone.

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#40

Post by nemomarx »

zdragnar wrote: post #19
rpastuszak wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why this is being downvoted?

The premise is that the intent of the law was good, so everyone should naturally change their behavior to obey the spirit of the law. That isn't how people work. The law was poorly written and even more poorly enforced. Attempts at "compliance" made the web browsing experience worse.

people intentionally made the banners annoying or tried to make the reject button smaller / more awkward so that they could keep tracking.

Definitely a failure of enforcement, but let's not pretend that was good faith compliance from operators either

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