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I told them forced consent was unlawful. 5 years later it cost Elkjop €1.8M

thatprivacyguy.com

171–180 of 308 posts

Re: I told them forced consent was unlawful. 5 years later it cost Elkjop €1.8M

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Went to a new doctor. As part of the check-in process, I was asked to "sign" a little digital pad, so, as I was told, they could properly use my insurance. I asked to see the hard copy of what I was signing and they couldn't find one. Then, for some reason, they were unable to print one. I gave up and scribbled my sig with my finger and then was seen by a doctor. It's maddening.

I'm sure someone smarter than me has a solution. Those papers you're required to sign are generally the result of regulation. Some law got passed that say "you can't share info unless you get signed permission". The person dreaming up the law thought that would be enough to stop getting them to share info. But, even if they cared about privacy, they don't want to increase all their expenses and run their own IT depar…

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Re: I told them forced consent was unlawful. 5 years later it cost Elkjop €1.8M

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This entire issue is sidestepped by having graduated fines (which GDPR has). If they keep doing it the amount keeps going up until eventually they go out of business. It really limits the ability to take advantage of the system which hopefully makes it not worthwhile to bother doing.

Up to 4% of turnover. So if they make more than that it is still profitable to keep going. Not that it is likely that they make that much in profit, but still. There probably shouldn’t be a limit, and there probably should be personal legal consequences such as jail time for repeat offenders.

You can apply a fine multiple times in a year if they don’t stop. As that 4% is based on global revenue you’re eventually going to make it unprofitable.

Re: I told them forced consent was unlawful. 5 years later it cost Elkjop €1.8M

#173
post #48

I'm so glad the GDPR never took hold in the US. Little Karens getting companies fined millions of dollars over what amounts to nothing. You can always not use their service. Plenty of alternatives out there.

Norway has in practice only two big box electronics chains. Not always "pleny of alternatives out there"

Re: I told them forced consent was unlawful. 5 years later it cost Elkjop €1.8M

#174

I'm sure I am wrong somewhere. But can someone explain to me how this same reasoning would not apply to every advertizing 'supported' business? You can't opt-out off ads on many websites or streaming services and still hsve access.

On most platforms you can usually opt out of targeted/personalized ads that require tracking or collecting personal data, if you do you still get general ads, but that isnt subject to GDPR if they dont use your data for it, I guess.

Re: I told them forced consent was unlawful. 5 years later it cost Elkjop €1.8M

#175

Lol. Brookfield Place wifi had an OPT IN for their wifi to receive marketing. If you unclicked it, the 'connect to wifi' button greyed out and a notification appears saying that Opt In is required for wifi.

Type the email address of somebody you dislike

yomomma@example.com works for me, most of the time. Some of the places that like to spam their users no matter what filter example.com out.

Re: I told them forced consent was unlawful. 5 years later it cost Elkjop €1.8M

#176
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the article, that is not what Elkjøp told him. You're making the assumption that what the article says must make sense, which is unfounded.

While we cannot be sure what Elkjøp exactly told him, the Norwegian DPA's findings included following: * Published benefits: https://web.archive.org/web/20220613175535/https:/www.elkjop... (e.g. "Rabatt på en rekke av våre tjenester utført i varehus", i.e. something like "Discount on a number of our services performed in warehouses") * Conditions to join, i.e. to receive the benefits (DPA's translation): * You may be…

Which is exactly the point - under Article 21 of the GDPR every person has a legal right not to be subjected to direct marketing so any forced direct marketing is unlawful and consent cannot be bundled (it must be specific under the GDPR) so bundling consent to direct marketing along with consent to join the Club is not lawful.

Which is why my next step is litigation.

Re: I told them forced consent was unlawful. 5 years later it cost Elkjop €1.8M

#177
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contracts don't and can't override laws.

In normal states not. But there you have the very popular political system called fascism, where contracts override laws.

That doesn't even make any sense. Fascism is generally about top-down enforced control, whereas contracts are heavily decentralized. The world where you'd have contracts override laws would be some sort of extreme anarcho-libertarian society, which is rather the opposite of fascism.

Re: I told them forced consent was unlawful. 5 years later it cost Elkjop €1.8M

#178
I am a EU citizen, I bought a (Chinese) robotic lawn mower.

One day, end of April when the grass is growing very rapidly, they presented me with a dialog in the app that basically said.

"We updated the EULA with the explanation "optimized wordings". Please accept."

There was no reference to the new or old EULA, and if I didn't accept I could not start the app and use my new mower. It was bricked.

I am now checking their compliance with GDPR. It is a tedious process because they keep stalling, but I still feel I have all the rights.

And I get a lot of help from chatgpt who works as a patient secretary that translates my "f-fck sake give me my stuff" into formal/friendly legalese with counter questions designed to be difficult to duck.

As of now, 2 months later, they have finally pointed me to "download personal data" in the application which gives me back a PDF with mower model, my email address and some push notification history.

But I know they store much more than that. And I think they know that I know. If nothing else my customer support history. But also for example a map of my garden.

Re: I told them forced consent was unlawful. 5 years later it cost Elkjop €1.8M

#179

I'm sure I am wrong somewhere. But can someone explain to me how this same reasoning would not apply to every advertizing 'supported' business? You can't opt-out off ads on many websites or streaming services and still hsve access.

It's called "pay-or-okay" and there hasn't been many decisions on it yet which has led noyb to sue German DPAs: https://noyb.eu/en/years-inactivity-pay-or-ok-cases-noyb-sue...

There is one case where DPA ruled in favor of the company, but it's currently being appealed: https://noyb.eu/en/pay-or-ok-der-spiegel-noyb-sues-hamburg-d...

Another one ruled against company and court agreed: https://noyb.eu/en/court-decides-pay-or-okay-derstandardat-i...

Re: I told them forced consent was unlawful. 5 years later it cost Elkjop €1.8M

#180

I wonder if anyone who are cheering this fine, actually read and tried to implement GDPR. It is a nightmare to be fully compliant for small companies. It is mostly just a theater (like endless cookie consent dialogs in anonymous browsing), to employ more experts and bureaucrats. EU is now pushing privacy laws that severely undermine privacy.

The companies made this worse for themselves by continuously trying to skirt around the rules and regulations.

When the cookie-law was first instituted I worked for an e-commerce site and was tasked with ensuring that we'd be compliant. It would have been crazy simple to implement, but no, because management, encouraged by the companies selling the tracking and re-targeting solutions kept insisting that I was reading the rules incorrectly. By incorrectly they meant: We want to be able to track and target customers all the time, regardless of the rules. The result was scraping my solution that truly allowed users to opt in, in favour of a commercial solution that just blocked then entire site until you clicked "Okay" and which wouldn't actually stop tracking if you dismissed it somehow.

Yeah, the rules are getting increasingly complicate and to some extend requires experts. That is because of businesses that have failed so miserably in regulating itself.

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