111–120 of 205 posts
IMO we should ban gathering this data without a warrant or specific contractual agreement between the device owner and entity aggregating the data. As much as congress loves to claim the interstate commerce theory of everything, this seems like a slam dunk.
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im not sure about allowed. perhaps required may be closer. why would someone include tech that makes people think twice about using the app, unless it is required if you want to "sell" in a particular venue. if your developing geolocation based apps, location tracking is a core function. a calender, absolutely does not require location tracking beyond what side of the prime meridian are you on.
> if your developing geolocation based apps, location tracking is a core function. But the subsequent sale of that data is not—is the discussion here.
you cant sell what you dont have unless you lie lower than a rug.
fix the data collection problem and a second order effect of no data for sale emerges.
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exactly. calling it 'anonymized' is pure security theater once you have enough data points to map out someones daily routine. waiting for legislation or eulas to fix this is a lost cause since adtech always finds a loophole. the fix has to be architectural. moving toward stateless proxies that strip device identifiers at the edge before they even hit upstream servers. if the payload never touches a persistent db ther…
To be honest, I feel like this is where iOS and Android are failing us. Why is every app allowed to embed a bunch of trackers? Only blocking cross-app tracking on user request as iOS does is not enough (and data of different apps/websites can be correlated externally).
Even if Google and Apple both want to commit to fighting this, it becomes a game of whack-a-mole, because there are all sorts of different ways to track users that the platforms can't control.
As an easy example: every time you share an Instagram post/video/reel, they generate a unique link that is tracked back to you so they can track your social graph by seeing which users end up viewing that link. (TikTok does the same thing, although they at least make it more obvious by showing that in the UI with "____ shared this video with you").
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As someone who has to implement it, it's really not bad at all: Ask the user for consent to use their data, and don't be misleading about it. That's it. The rest of the "It'S So LaRgE AnD UndErSpEciFieD" is just FUD. The regulators don't just slap fines, they work with you to get you to comply, and they just want to see that you're putting in the effort instead of messing them about. I have literally never been surpr…
> for everything in the middle, nobody will punish you for an honest mistake. How do you know that? Again the law establishes a rules making body that can at any time change or add rules, and as far as I can tell there's no public review process.
Just ban the sale of any kind of adtracking. That way we can get rid of the cookiewalls too. Missed opportunity by the EU when they wrote GDPR.
> Missed opportunity by the EU when they wrote GDPR. Not really. There are legitimate reasons why I might wish to be tracked or give my personal data to a company. As long as I'm asked to give clear, opt-in informed consent, this is perfectly fine. This is the very essence of the GDPR! Instead, direct your ire to the scummy adtech industry who are constantly asking to invade my privacy and smell my knickers trying to…
In these cases they don't even need to ask for your permission.
> Instead, direct your ire to the scummy adtech industry who are constantly asking to invade my privacy and smell my knickers trying to work out what I ate for lunch. Another law to ban the adtech industry would be welcome from me, though would meet fierce resistance from the likes of Google.
No, the EU should have done more to prevent this. They didn't want to kill a billions-of-euros industry. But they should have.
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yes, so if ad tracking is forbidden outright then asking for permission to do it is invalid too.
We certainly do need another law to ban the adtech industry..... Though no doubt that would prompt a _shitstorm_ from Google, Elon and chums.
The adtech industry has, time and again, proven they cannot self-regulate to any decent capacity. At this point, the only reasonable course of action is to shackle them down with such heavy legislative burdens they're rendered de facto extinct.
I will not mourn their loss.
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You can literally read the entire "complicated" regulation in one sitting in an afternoon. There's literally nothing complex or complicated about it. Congrats on gullibly believing the ad tech narrative.
The "GDPR is complicated" meme has been circulating among software developers since probably before it was even written. It's so wild that HN dunks on it so much: Here we have a societal problem in computing we've been complaining about for decades, someone offers an incremental but imperfect regulation to start taking steps to correct it, and everyone hates it!
What is data processing essential for the services being provided? Many publishers assumed that getting paid was an essential part of providing a service, and it was not until 3 months before the implementation deadline that the committee clarified that getting paid is not included when you are being paid by a third party.
How are you to know whether or not the user is an EU citizen (and thus subject to the GDPR)? Is making that determination a service essential for providing your service? The answers apparently were "You don't" and "No", which would effectively make companies assume that the GDPR applies to everyone on the planet.
The GDPR also is fundamentally opposed to how things currently work in the internet, making almost all advertising on the web illegal overnight. It was too big of a change to happen at once, so it effectively only loosely enforced in practice.
I like the idea of the GDPR, but the implementation sucks.
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yes, so if ad tracking is forbidden outright then asking for permission to do it is invalid too.
We certainly do need another law to ban the adtech industry..... Though no doubt that would prompt a _shitstorm_ from Google, Elon and chums.