Live data from Hacker News

Europe's GDPR privacy law is headed for red tape bonfire within 'weeks'

politico.eu

111–120 of 190 posts

Re: Europe's GDPR privacy law is headed for red tape bonfire within 'weeks'

#111
post #5

The politicians cite competitiveness as the motivator for relaxing the GDPR. The real reason for the EU lagging behind the US in "big tech" is of course the lack of venture capital and the red tape in registering corporations. The GDPR does not prevent US big tech from operating in the EU. As it stands, this is just another attack on EU citizens' rights. It is also the least of the EU's current problems. De-industria…

> and the red tape in registering corporations.

what red tape? from what I understand you have your articles of incorporation, your id an register with chamber of commerce. I mean it varies from country to country and licenses and all the EU stuff exists, but what red tape is there when registering the company itself?

Re: Europe's GDPR privacy law is headed for red tape bonfire within 'weeks'

#112

If the GDPR is simplified, the fines should be drastically raised. (At least for companies) E.g. to minimum 20% of the global last years revenue, for bigger companies (FAANG-Scale) to minimum 70% of the revenue. The GDPR must make companies afraid of breaking the law.

(looking at the DMA act) they know, they know.

Re: Europe's GDPR privacy law is headed for red tape bonfire within 'weeks'

#113
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you did not understand my comment. 1. It is a problem for greenfield projects too. Not everyone has sufficient expertise to be fully compliant from the beginning. The accidental non-compliance is possible and there's usually a cost to prevent it. 2. It may work as expected from EU charter perspective, but current implementation is adding extra to an already high bureaucratic workload. My point is, it can be b…

> It is a problem for greenfield projects too. Not everyone has sufficient expertise to be fully compliant from the beginning Saying it's complicated because of missing experience or knowledge is like saying creating a CRUD application is difficult. Yes, it might be difficult if you've never done it before, but that doesn't mean the thing itself is complicated, just that you potentially lack experience. Instead, I'd…

Ok, let me try to explain once again:

> if you have experience with it

This must not be an expectation for any regulation that applies to business in general. Let’s say I just graduated from a college where I learned to be a plumber. I registered my firm and now want to acquire customers online, so I hire some local agency to build a website and an order form. You cannot realistically expect that I have any experience with GDPR or fully understand its requirements. It is the job of legislators to ensure that I can achieve compliance with minimum effort. But now I have to carry the burden, because no business can survive without digital marketing channels and I have to outsource the compliance work to ensure I don’t accidentally break the law. In comparison to pre-digital era doing any business today is more expensive and I‘d argue, it’s unnecessarily more expensive. It is not how it should have been done and it doesn’t work as expected from business point of view. Non-compliant businesses are not those who are malicious or ignorant, they can make mistakes because legislators did not help them.

Re: Europe's GDPR privacy law is headed for red tape bonfire within 'weeks'

#114
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We live in an Orwellian world: War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Simplification is complication.

Alternatively: Peace is a lie, there is only passion. Through passion, I gain strength. Through strength, I gain power. Through power, I gain victory. Through victory, my chains are broken. The Force shall free me.

> Peace is a lie, there is only passion.

Lie is Truth... sure, sure.

> Through passion, I gain strength.

Weakness is Strength

Sounds like a 1984 sequel from 1939.

Re: Europe's GDPR privacy law is headed for red tape bonfire within 'weeks'

#115
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cookie banners are largely a cargo cult and don't have to be nearly as annoying as they are. Websites just love to say "we have to do this" rather than improve their UX because the latter just means more work while the former gets people to be wrongfully upset at GDPR.

I think cookie banners are a not-so-subtle sabotage of the GDPR. The more annoyance they can associate with GDPR the more the customers will want to water it down. And bonus, it's completely deniable.

And it's largely working. Even on a site like HN where you'd expect people to be educated about this stuff, we have people claiming that GDPR (and not their own data collection practices) forces them to pop up a cookie banner.

Re: Europe's GDPR privacy law is headed for red tape bonfire within 'weeks'

#116
post #3

> The GDPR is seen as one of Europe's most complex pieces of legislation by the technology sector Really? Now I'm no bureaucrat, merely an engineer, but GDPR was relatively easy to read through, even the official document ( https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE... ) is only 88 pages long, this cannot realistically be "one of Europe's most complex pieces of legislation". A lot of privacy-conscio…

> merely an engineer

Exactly. You are unlikely to be personally liable for this.

This sort of thing starts becoming complicated when you are responsible for making sure a random government does not try to make an example out of your company for whatever reason.

Re: Europe's GDPR privacy law is headed for red tape bonfire within 'weeks'

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only "store" my webserver's logs and user submitted comments. But someone can still put the legal pressure on me, a random person, to force me to do work to turn over those logs/etc. It's wild. Like having a security camera, hosting a BBQ for the neighborhood, and having a neighbor demand access to the recorded video with legal threats. This whole thing really only makes sense in the context of for-profit incorpora…

Why do you store your webserver's logs? My reading of the GDPR (I am not a lawyer) is that it strongly encourages site owners to store the very minimum amount of data about visitors - something that I wholeheartedly agree with. Server logs are useful for debugging the site but also contain potentially identifying information (IP addresses) so I have my site delete them after 48 hours. User submitted comments are obvi…

I read the logs with my human eyes manually because I am interested in learning about the web and internet. In fact today I found a whole new useful search engine because I saw it's spider in my logs.

    64.62.202.82 "GET /library/Math/Mathematical%20Methods%20for%20Physicists_%20A%20concise%20introduction_%20Tai%20L%20Chow_%202000.pdf -" "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Centurybot/1.0; +http://www.rightdao.com/bot.html) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
It turns out that http://www.rightdao.com/ is a great old-style search engine that actually returns many tens of pages and thousands of results. As opposed to google that only ever returns I guess I keep logs because I want to interact more directly with the internet as a whole and experience the serendipity that comes with that.

Re: Europe's GDPR privacy law is headed for red tape bonfire within 'weeks'

#118
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>At the minimum I'd hope they a) do away with the worthless cookie banners requirement b) cut some generous but reasonable slack to small organizations. Cookie banners aren't a requirement unless you wish to store cookies that aren't strictly necessary (statistics, marketing, etc)[0]. Cookies that are essential for the user to browse the site (login tokens) don't require consent. It doesn't help the situation that a…

>Cookie banners aren't a requirement unless you wish to store cookies that aren't strictly necessary (statistics, marketing, etc)[0]. Cookies that are essential for the user to browse the site (login tokens) don't require consent. So if I use telemetry to catch some dirty frontend blob throwing a hissy fit of an exception and that telemetry is tracking sessions rather than individual events (hello ms app insights) --…

If you are monitoring the system but not its users, then that is not collecting PII.

To be completely sure, you should eliminate anything that might be considered PII.

So unadorned exception counts would be anonymous, aggregated statistics, which is fine. But exception counts reports per IP address, or per session, or where the exception text mentioned the user's PII, would require consent from the user you're tracking by processing that data about them.

Re: Europe's GDPR privacy law is headed for red tape bonfire within 'weeks'

#119
post #5

The politicians cite competitiveness as the motivator for relaxing the GDPR. The real reason for the EU lagging behind the US in "big tech" is of course the lack of venture capital and the red tape in registering corporations. The GDPR does not prevent US big tech from operating in the EU. As it stands, this is just another attack on EU citizens' rights. It is also the least of the EU's current problems. De-industria…

Registering corporations is pretty fast all things considered. Or reasonably affordable even for buying existing one.

The thing really is that there is lot less readiness to simply burn money on anything and everything. And then keep doing that even further...

Re: Europe's GDPR privacy law is headed for red tape bonfire within 'weeks'

#120
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You are required to have a cookie banner if you use cookies Feel free to (re)read the regulation, there is no such requirement at all. > you must serve a cookie banner even if you are only using functional cookies Specifically, where are you getting this from? It's a misunderstanding at best, but you're spreading it like it's confirmed information.

I spent months implementing GDPR compliance with a set of EU-based lawyers. Most businesses are not actually GDPR compliant, even to this day. I assume this is a big reason the EU is willing to take another look at what is required for compliance.

I think you’re confusing the ePrivacy Directive, which regulates cookies, and the GDPR, which regulates PII.
Post reply on HN