EU's citizens are ripe for the taking. GAFAM, Palantir & co are going for the kill (we hope not like in Gaza)
Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws
501–510 of 1001 posts
Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws
#502I get that too many regulations is a bad thing. But when we talk privacy and personal data there should be no gray zone. It has to be black and white. When I see a stupid cookie banner I search for "Reject all". There's no some data that companies can collect and process without my consent, they just shouldn't be able to collect anything without me actively opting in. Business never respects anything, but profits. Se…
More regulation , or stronger regulation, as in less wiggle room for businesses, may be a good thing. Case in point: a regulation requiring to disclose the ingredients of food. Too many regulations is almost always a bad thing: numerous pieces of regulation rarely fit together seamlessly. It becomes easier to miss some obscure piece, or to encounter a contradiction, or to find a loophole. The cost of compliance also…
> The cost of compliance also grows, and that disproportionately favors big established players.
Not true at all. Most of the harsher regulations only come into effect when the company hits a specific size. Examples from Australia (my country):
- Online shops that operate overseas, and import to Australia have to collect sales tax... but only if they make more than $75,000 from Australia per annum.
- Social media has to ban Australians under 16... but only if they make more than a billion per annum.
Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws
#503Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having coded multiple such buttons in the past, I'd like to ask to consider that the person doing the coding is barely the person making the decision. It's hard to reject such a request when your lifelihood depends on the job
Which is why we need professional licensure: You get to tell your boss "If I tell you to go fuck yourself, then I risk this job. If I implement your feature, I risk losing every future job by losing my license. And everybody you can hire to do this will tell you the same thing".
I don't want to live in your hellscape where my government tells me I can't program a website without a license.
Grow up and tell someone you won't implement a feature because you don't like it. I do it all the time - "that's a bad idea, I'm not doing that". I still manage to eat, it's not either/or, you have agency, you can refuse without resorting to regulation saying you must.
Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws
#504I 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.
So “smart rules” only means “more rules”? Smart rule making includes reducing the regulatory burden when it overreaches. The weight of regulation around tech in the EU is creating an environment such that the only companies that can operate in a space are the ones who can afford massive compliance overhead. That leaves you with the very same big tech firms that people are writing these rules to protect themselves fro…
Right, but it's obviously not overreaching, because user's data is taken:
1. Without their consent,
2. Without their knowledge and,
3. Cannot be taken back or denied in a simple way.
There is a problem space here, in which there is zero solution. There is absolutely nothing, _NOTHING_, consumers can do if they want to protect their privacy. And before I hear 'well just don't use...' no - uh uh, that doesn't count. That's not a solution.
So, we need some kind of regulation. And, to be clear, it doesn't need to make violating privacy illegal. It doesn't, and the GPDR doesn't either. It just needs to make it possible for consumers to choose.
A free market is built on consumer choice, that is the core of a free market. It might seem counterintuitive, but regulation that protect consumer choice actually bolster the free market, not impede it.
The "reason" the EU is "struggling" isn't because only big dogs can compete. It's because US companies, which need not follow the rules, exist, and will slurp up the competition.
It's hard to compete with Google because they are cheaters. It's hard to compete with Meta because they are cheaters. They make literally hundreds of billions of dollars off of dark patterns, lies, stealing data, and privacy violations. If you even try to be honest, not even be good, just be honest, you will lose. Because they are not honest.
Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws
#505I get that too many regulations is a bad thing. But when we talk privacy and personal data there should be no gray zone. It has to be black and white. When I see a stupid cookie banner I search for "Reject all". There's no some data that companies can collect and process without my consent, they just shouldn't be able to collect anything without me actively opting in. Business never respects anything, but profits. Se…
You can do this trivially in modern browsers: private browsing. I have one "normal" browser window for "persistent cookie" use (like gmail, youtube, etc) and another "private" window for everything else. Cookies are lost anytime a tab closes.
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Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws
#506Earlier 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.
I don't know if it's a changing of the audience or a change in how people behave generally, but this place has been insufferable lately whenever anything remotely related to Donald Trump's administration comes up. One of the things that made this place special relative to other online communities is the ethos to interrogate through a lens of curiosity. Now, there's a lot of vitriol that's indistinguishable from any o…
My rule for a sane HN experience: avoid and flag any articles related to Trump, Elon, , American politics, and anything tangential that summons them.
Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws
#507Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well you can't just replace a word with a different word and then act like things are the same. If you do choose to do that, you, at the very least, have to explain how 'automobile repair' and 'regulations' are analogous. Because in my mind, they are not. There are many, many people ideologically opposed to regulation. I've never met anyone ideologically opposed to auto repair, or even just opposed in general.
i could have chosen anything, you choose and do it. he didn't say anything at all. "i no longer consider these issues to be black and white [riffing on another comment], i now see it more nuanced, where some things need more of something and others need less of that thing. deep, no?"
Well he is saying something here, because as pointed out, many people approach this from an ideological place.
Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws
#508I 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.
You could simply ban targeted advertising, since that's what everyone is actually upset about, and not create insane collateral damage for non-adtech operators who happen to have network services and databases.
Everyone is upset about that except the people clicking on it, which seems to be a lot of people given the amount of revenue and how much people will bid for placement.
So it's not everyone, is it even most people? I'm not sure.
I do feel for you if you happen to live in the EU, but you get what you vote for. I don't live there, none of my businesses operate there, so I'm free to ignore it. The GDPR ends where the EU does, and cross-border enforcement of laws requires a bilateral agreement, that I would have to vote for.
I think there are many people who are fine with targeted advertising and also fine leading a private life in non-GDPR jurisdictions. I think that covers most people in the world.
Given the amount of ad-revenue services I get access to, it's a very good tradeoff for me, please don't kill it, and if you do kill it, stick to your own jurisdiction please.
Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws
#509Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can do this trivially in modern browsers: private browsing. I have one "normal" browser window for "persistent cookie" use (like gmail, youtube, etc) and another "private" window for everything else. Cookies are lost anytime a tab closes.
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Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws
#510Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is accurate, however if you look at any thread you can see an overwhelming consensus of opinion. The diversity of views are not equal - in the sense that there isnt equal number of for and against comments. In most of the threads I have observed about EU action on Big Tech, the overwhelming majority of thoughts are 'for', with perhaps few dissenting thoughts.
I think there is plenty of diversity of comments, substantially less diversity in voting and flagging. You can say lots of things, many that go against the hive mind will just get you more or less instantly grayed or even flagged
> substantially less diversity in voting and flagging
I don't think this is true either. I've seen comments swing wildly from one end to the other and back. It's more that comments show a distribution, while voting squashes that distribution into a single result.