The EU is a great example of a spineless paper tiger to Big Tech and is the reason why AI startups run to the US.
Promoting degrowth is the best way to lose the race and the EU have finally admitted that they got it completely wrong.
Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws
121–130 of 1001 posts
Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws
#122[deleted]
Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws
#123This is such an important change for Europe. I've worked with 100+ start-ups as a consultant, and I've talked to EU ones who have been strangled by some of the regulations.
What were they doing with user data?
Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws
#124Let me steelman the new proposal a little bit:
You run a merch store. You want to share with your suppliers order data so that you can get the right number of sizes/colors/etc. Is this PII under GDPR rules? Technically, yes! Not only is there information on gender, but also people's height and weight and maybe even family makeup. Does it make sense to call this data sub-processing? Eh? Maybe? (To my knowledge, I don't know if any examples like this actually caught any enforcement.)
Under the new proposal, sharing this data is okay, so long as you use pseudo-anonymous identifiers (customer-1234, customer-1235). You still can't share sensitive identifiers (name, address, email, login, etc).
Obviously the elephant in the room is AI and training data. But this also simplifies a lot of the ticky-tacky areas in GDPR where PII rules are opaque and not-consistently enforced anyway.
Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws
#125Does this mean that whois information can come back? The destruction of the whois databases by GDPR really made the internet a more closed, proprietary place. No more could one just contact the people behind any domain and communicate... pretty much impossible after GDPR came into effect. Especially if you don't use twitter/corporate crap.
That was already the case for the majority of domains.
Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws
#126Poor Europe - lobbyists make sure that Europe stays weak. That statement includes Ursula by the way.
You can't build large ML models without swaths of data, and GDPR is the antitheses of collecting data. Therefore countries/companies that don't have to abide by it are at an obvious advantage. If anything this is coming from political elite being convinced that AI research is a critical topic, EU recognizing it's weak because of the self-imposed handicaps and trying to move past that. I'd be shocked if we manage to d…
The GDPR is about protecting personal data, what personal data could you possibly need to train an AI model?
Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws
#127I sympathize with the startup argument: heavy compliance costs can stifle early innovation. But the solution shouldn’t be “weaker rules.” It should be smarter rules, clearer safe harbors for small actors, browser-level consent primitives for users, and stronger enforcement against dark-pattern CMPs. That keeps privacy meaningful without killing small businesses.
> clearer safe harbors for small actors Different rules for different people huh? Just because you like the group you're benefiting and dislike the group you're harming doesn't mean that is good policy.
> Different rules for different people huh?
Compliance has fixed costs. And smaller operations have a smaller blast radius when things go wrong. Reducing requirements for smaller operators makes sense.
Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws
#128>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.
Wait, what? So they are now mandating browsers implement this? Also, something bothers me about the conflation of regulators changing the regulation (accurate) with regulators changing the thing that resulted from the previous version of the regulation (inaccurate). They arent getting rid of the cookie banners. They are changing the underlying rules that gave rise to them. It remains to be seen what the effects of the new rules will be.
Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws
#129Earlier 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.
The hackers are still here, lurking in the shadows. Bananas. They are just tired of being berated by fanboys anytime they criticize the will of the tech bros. There is no fun in typing out a well-researched answer only to face a torrent of one-second "nah, you are wrong" replies mixed in with AI slop. Bananas.
Am I the victim of the algorithm? Because all I see on HN these days is people pessimistic about tech and society. The tenor here is overwhelmingly negative.
Where are you seeing anyone defend big tech, tech bros, or any tech in general?
Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws
#130Companies made cookie banners as obnoxious as possible, because they knew that by making people hate the banners, the population would turn against the GDRP
Is that why most of the EU governmental websites have the same cookie pop up banners?
Lack of product ownership and cargo cult developers.
Legislation can’t change culture.