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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

#51
post #21

> One change that’s likely to please almost everyone is a reduction in Europe’s ubiquitous cookie banners and pop-ups. Under the new proposal, some “non-risk” cookies won’t trigger pop-ups at all, and users would be able to control others from central browser controls that apply to websites broadly. Finally!

Can we get the do-not-track header instead? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track Because that made more sense than the cookie banner ever did. Edit: it looks like there is a legal alternative now: Global Privacy Control.

Instead of what? Instead of the central browser controls?

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#52
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

My company did not retain customer data or retained very little. So compliance for us was very simple. If your business venture relies on that PII data you're going to have a hard time. And I'm not exactly sympathetic since I'm regularly getting notified from HaveIbeenPwned about another PII leak.

I'm not sure what you're looking for here. If your position is "it should be difficult to make a company that has PII" you won't get any significant AI or consumer tech companies in your jurisdiction. That's just reality, they use PII, they personalize on PII, they receive PII, that's how they work.

If that is your goal, OK, that's a choice, but then you can't say "oh GDPR fears were overblown". They caused exactly the problems people were predicting, and that's what EU leadership is now trying to change.

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#54
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…

> 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!

An OS feature is also a terrible option - remember when South Korean banks forced the country to use ActiveX and Internet Explorer?

The government should offer some open digital ID service where you can verify yourself with 2FA online, after registering your device and setting credentials when you get your ID card + residence registration in person.

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#55
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 live in EU. I am totally in support to force Meta down through government's big stick. While they are at it, I hope they do it to the other big techs too. Being a "hacker type" (whatever that means) does not equate to being complacent to these companies abusing their economic power.

Then I propose you should support https://noyb.eu/

Their track record is pretty good.

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hackers should know the government is never on your side.

Growth hackers aim for regulatory capture.

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It worked to highlight the insane amount of tracking every fucking website does. Unfortunately it didn’t stop it. A browser setting letting me reject everything by default will be a better implementation. But this implementation only failed because almost every website owner wants to track your every move and share those moves with about 50 different other trackers and doesn’t want to be better.

You can just set your browser not to send whichever cookies you don't want to. Cookies are a client-side technology. Why does the government need to be involved?

The website wouldn’t inform you about which cookies are doing what. You wouldn’t have a basis to decide on which cookies you want because they are useful versus which you don’t because they track you. You also wouldn’t be informed when functional cookies suddenly turn into tracking cookies a week later.

The whole point of the consent popups is to inform the user about what is going on. Without legislation, you wouldn’t get that information.

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#58

> One change that’s likely to please almost everyone is a reduction in Europe’s ubiquitous cookie banners and pop-ups. Under the new proposal, some “non-risk” cookies won’t trigger pop-ups at all, and users would be able to control others from central browser controls that apply to websites broadly. Finally!

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)

The issue is the lack of enforcement of the law. And instead of strengthening the enforcement, they are diluting the law now.

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#59

Does anyone have a link to the proposal, preferably on the EU website? I'd like to see for myself, as I don't consider moving the consent method from the webpage to the browser settings "watering down" — it's the opposite.

They can be downloaded here: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/digital-omn...

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

like UK, you mean? boy that did really work out well for them!

So far so good - and I say this as one voting remain. The only gripe I have is that our domestic doomers were even more stupid than the EU ones. Ours were the progenitors of many of EU dumb ideas. So even outside EU, we in the UK not only did not repeal the utterly imbecilic laws we inherited. No - we added even more stupid laws. Consequence being people are put in jail for writing stuff on the Internet. I hope someo…

I think a lot of Brexiteers don't entirely understand why the EU was a problem.

The only thing they saw was the EU migrant crisis and the UK not having total control over its own borders. Things I don't care about[0]. The actual problem with the EU is only tangentially related to that concern, and it's the fact that the EU is a democratically unresponsive accountability sink. When a politician wants to do something unpopular, they get the EU to do it, so they can pretend like they're powerless against it. See also: the 10,000 attempts to reintroduce Chat Control.

The easiest way to fix this would be a new EU treaty that makes the EU directly elected. But that would also mean federalizing the EU, because all the features that make the EU undemocratic are the same features that protect the EU from doing an end run around member states. The alternative would be for EU member states' voters to deliberately sacrifice their local votes in order to vote in people who promise to appoint specific people at the EU level. That's what happened in America with its Senate, and why it moved to direct election of Senators, because people were being voted in as Governor just to get Senators elected.

A lot of times we talk about political issues on a partisanship spectrum - i.e. "partisan" vs "bi-partisan" or "non-partisan" issues. The reality is that, in WEIRD[1] countries, most parties have a common goal of "keep the state thriving". The primary disagreement between them is how to go about doing such a thing and what moral lines[2] shall be crossed to do so. That's where you get shit like America's culture war. The people who live in the country and are subject to its laws are far less hospitable to the kinds of horrifying decisions politicians make on a daily basis, mainly because they'll be at the business end of them. This creates a dynamic of "anti-partisanship" where the people broadly support things that the political class broadly opposes.

For example, DMCA 1201. The people did not want this, the EFF successfully fought a prior version of it off in Congress, then Congress went to the WTO and begged them to handcuff America to it anyway. The people would like to see it reformed or repealed; that's where you get the "right-to-repair" movement. But the political class needs DMCA 1201 to be there. They need a thriving cultural industry to engage in cultural hegemony, and a technology sector that can be made to shut off the enemy's tanks. The kinds of artistic and technological megaprojects the state demands require a brutal and extractive intellectual property[3] regime in order to be economically sustainable. So IP is a bi-partisan concern, while Right-to-Repair is an anti-partisan concern.

In terms of WEIRD countries, the UK is probably one of the WEIRDest, and thus a progenitor of a lot of stupid bullshit legislation. If they had not left the EU, the Online Safety Act would have been the EU Online Safety Directive.

[0] To be clear, my opinion regarding migration is that the only valid reason to refuse entry to a country is for a specific security reason. Otherwise, we should hand out visas like candy, for the sake of freedom. Immigration restrictions are really just emigration restrictions with extra steps.

[1] Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic

[2] All states are fundamentally "criminals with crowns". Their economies are rapine. When they run out of shit to steal all the gangsters turn on each other and you get a failed state.

[3] In the Doctorowian sense: "any law that grants the ability to dictate the conduct of your competitors". This actually extends back far further than copyright, patent, or trademark law does. Those are the modern capitalist versions of a far older feudalist practice of the state handing out monopolies to favored lords.

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