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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

#271

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.

That is an absolute nonsense.

At minimum, government will be useful as defence against worse government.

I know that some anarchist had dream of a stateless world, but it is not viable.

And while I am not going to say that any government is ideal, many are better than USSR, Third Reich or Cambodia under Pol Pot.

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#272
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t track your site visitors. No tracking, no banner. Or respect the now deprecated DNT flag, no banner necessary. Now we get DNT 2.0 and the website owner will once again maliciously comply.

OK sounds great. But some companies prefer to have trackers. They are required by GDPR to explain each cookie and offer a control for permissions. They probably had trackers before GDPR too. So how is that malicious compliance? They are just operating how they did before except now they are observing GDPR. It sounds like maybe you just want them to ban trackers. Or for people to care more about trackers and stop usin…

You can have first party trackers. That is not so hard. Every site onto itself is a first party tracker, but if your developers can't do it there are opensource solutions available to host.

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Browser level consent primitives would be a significant improvement on the status quo.

Do Not Track was a spectacular failure. You can still turn cookies off in your user agent though.

It was a spectacular failure because the people who thought of it didn't stick to it.

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#275
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…

Another backhanded way to forbid opensource solutions? Because now they will argue we need secure booted tamper-proof windows/mac os to make sure the proof is legit.

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I really want to see is Meta getting irrelevant ON MERIT. People stop using Meta products, and then I want to see it die. The problem is that with a nearly infinite amount of money, you are not going to get irrelevant on merit. You just buy up any company/talent that becomes a threat. They have done that with Instagram and WhatsApp (which was and is really huge in Europe etc.).

Didnt the judge rule literally yesterday that this wasnt illegal. This was one of Lina Khan's signature lawsuits, and judge didnt agree even a single one of FTC's arguments.

Just because something is not illegal does not make it a good thing. Judges have political ties and if the people in power dont want any monopoly laws, then there wont be any monopoly laws.

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#277
post #91

This 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.

I do not care about 100s of startups and how they want to use my data for advertisement or other things they benefit from.

I care about keeping my personal data private so it will be more difficult to use for profiling me for whatever (whatever!) reason, but all are for other's benefit on no or marginal benefit for me in overwhelmingly major part of the cases.

If startups cannot do properly, then they should not do at all! They must spend on handling personal data well if they want to handle personal data at all! There are way enough already and most are just go out and bust, circulating data collected who knows where and how. And they are surprised it is so hard compiling data on people, people are increasingly reluctant to share because the so many abuse and actual damages caused by personal data abused.

People are important, not the startups!

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#278
post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What were they doing with user data?

Number one use case is sending anonymized and hashed data back to the ad platform to trigger conversion events. Essentially all modern advertising is done algorithmically. The platform takes conversion events (a typical event is "someone fills out a form"), that signal is sent to the platforms, and the platforms use it to serve your ad to other people who may be interested. GDPR as it is means you need opt-in to do t…

Biggest issue with this is the modern web ads don't even work.

You get ads for fridge AFTER you bought one since they now know you browsed them.

What works is content based advertising - so advertise a power drill on a woodworking hobbyist site. No tracking required there. Conversion can be obtained when user clicks a link via redirect. Like in the good ol times.

But this modern approach that massively invades privacy has been sold to businesses and now they require it even though it is probably ineffectual.

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#279
post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What were they doing with user data?

Number one use case is sending anonymized and hashed data back to the ad platform to trigger conversion events. Essentially all modern advertising is done algorithmically. The platform takes conversion events (a typical event is "someone fills out a form"), that signal is sent to the platforms, and the platforms use it to serve your ad to other people who may be interested. GDPR as it is means you need opt-in to do t…

They are strangled by rules in using personal data on algorithmic advertismenet?

GOOD!

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#280
Protecting users in the bargains we strike with big tech is a worthwhile and noble effort, but privacy law has generally woefully failed to do this.

Millions upon millions have been spent on cookie banners -- people are still arguing about them in this thread -- but there is almost zero benefit to this expense.

The main thing that's good about this, IMO, is that fundamentally training a large language model and privacy law as it's written today cannot coexist. They are incompatible. And allowing someone to break the law forever (as is happening today) is not a good long-term solution.

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