It took me half a day: Had to download a GDPR pivacy policy template, read through the thing. Double check all the sections applied to what I was doing (cookies, etc) and fill in my details. What have you spend 1 year doing if I may ask? Did you previously store passwords in plain text and you had to update that?
Can someone fill me in on why I'm getting downvoted?
I stopped questioning downvotes. It's just plain stupid and has no reasoning after all. But people will resort to the commenting rules or something like that, because they don't understand sarcasm and think your comment is "low quality" or something like that. It's puzzling.
With 500 million EU citizens, that's about €3 per person. This makes me wonder, how much does Google make from showing ads to one person?
In AdWords the CPC for some keywords is around €3. Obviously not every EU citizen will be the target of these keywords but Google can increase the CPC to recover the money.
There are plenty of keywords where it's 10x that Plumber PPC keywords can be £20-40 in the UK
Pretty naieve view to accept an effectively unaccountable body of such incredible size. Almost every policy is without a voter mandate.
I wonder if that’s why the policies are generally so sensible?
Except that is a fiction you have created because it meets some presupposed view you have. The EU, application of legislation regarding technology is almost entirely designed to attack those companies on the basis they don't recognize revenue in France, Germany.
Pretty naieve view to accept an effectively unaccountable body of such incredible size. Almost every policy is without a voter mandate.
You could say the same about your own country's government. Do you get a vote over antitrust regulations enacted by your own government? You usually vote a party which might (or not) have a high-level guidelines over a few select policies, but otherwise trust them to make the best decision based on how their political view matches with yours. You elect EU parliament member the same way, and you are free to vote other…
So you think scaling that up to a massive scale where a handful of interests, namely France and Germany, have near complete sway over the agenda makes sense?
I don't think there was any prospect of war between the EU countries while the USSR was around, it seems folly to pin peace to an institution when it was a greater enemy that actually united us.
IMHO the EU is a direct result of the two World Wars, not the Cold War (we're only starting to see the results of the Cold War now).
Yeah the League of Nations was the result of the first one and it failed. Given the sheer slaughter they needed a way to forge peace as it clearly was massively self destructive.
I am not sure how true it was but I heard a theory that Europe lost much of its intellectual prominence due to so many young men dying in the trenches in WW1 - now Europe does good intellectual work now but it is more "neat thing out of Europe" as opposed to "the hotspot". I am not well equipped to evaluate the merits but the idea is interesting at very least.
That happens to most fines, everywhere. In case this is in accusation of corrupt practices aimed to increase the EU budget, note: - Fines account for - The EU budget is relatively small compared to national governments' budgets. EU: 150 billion, Germany + France + UK = 5 Trillion (5,000 billion). That's leaving out 24 smaller economies. National governments have a lot of input in the decision-making process and could…
> rather high standards of enforcement and corporate governance in the US require less EU intervention More likely that US companies are so comparatively wealthy that even apparently large fines aren't as large as fraction of revenue. Anchoring fallacy.
That's one part of the story. There's only one tech company in all of Europe that can easily digest a $1.7 billion fine.
SAP is Europe's most profitable tech company by far. About $4.5 billion in net income ($7b in operating income).
The US has at least 16 tech companies at that level of profit or higher.
Just Microsoft + Google + Amazon + Facebook + Apple = $185 billion in annual operating income.
In terms of sales, those five combined companies are the size of Turkey or Saudia Arabia in GDP (they'd be around the 19th or 18th largest economy in the world).
I don't know, I see the super state that the EU wants to become as scary as the super tech company people fear in Google. Also, making it hard to change browsers is not the same as prohibiting changing browsers. Some things are hard to change in Linux too, but I am sure for different reasons that are the result of how they pile on top of each other. The EU could use a cash infusion though given its current economic s…
For starters, this fine isn’t about browsers, it’s about AdSense. Apart from that, we can discuss the pros and cons of multinational treaty cooperations until we’re blue in the face but at the very least the EU in principle follows a democratic postulate, meaning that its citizens have decision power. Google is fundamentally unaccountable to anybody but its largest shareholders. If you fear democratically steered tre…
I am not as optimistic on the EU as you are. Reading 1984, before 1984, and growing up during the Cold War, definitely has shaped my thoughts on some of this, especially a single state or one-world government. A pan-European state, with one flag, it's own anthem, and the desire for a single army doesn't pass my sniff test of just being a multinational treaty cooperation, or a "democratically steered treaty union" as you write above. It points toward a bigger thing in action of that which some of its proponents oppose in their ideals. Trotsky pushed for a communist, soviet united states of Europe in 1923.
As far as AdSense goes, after reading the article a second time, I am not convinced of it being a forced monopoly (Apple iPhones and other options), and I see the fine as protectionist and not under antitrust violation. I see the same protectionism here in the US too.
I gave up an iPhone for an Android phone, because I think it gives me more choice to install what I want, to hack away at it, in a way that feels more free to me than when I had an iPhone (back in 2016, maybe it has changed?).
That's the crux of it. It's not asking companies to do anything they shouldn't have already been doing if they were conscious about security. The problem is it's been blown completely out of proportion to a point where by son's child minder sent out letters asking for our permission to contact us if our child is unwell (Of course she should - that isn't unsolicited contact. She was already covered!).
> The problem is it's been blown completely out of proportion [...] Yeah, but blame that on the lawyers who wanted to cash in on this new regulation. I think only _very few_ people/business owners actually took the time to read the GDPR and think about whether all of that even applies to them. Most just became a victim of the fearmongering around all of that.
I've seen a lot of scaremongering but none of that was from lawyers.
My observations was most of the negativity came from a combination of the press writing slanted articles criticising the EU (which is fairly typical for anything relating to the EU, it seems) and blogs from people who assumed the worst case and subsequently wrote a hysteria-driven knee-jerk opinion piece as a result. Those blogs, I've found, are the worst examples because they're more likely to spread like a virus where people say "if they're worried then I should be to!" Where as these days people can dismiss the press a little easier if it doesn't confirm their cognitive bias.
That's just my opinion from what I've observed though. I'm not trying to claim anything as fact here.
It's absolutely not a small cost. It cost the last startup I worked for around two weeks of development time, plus in many cases it prevents us (or adds massive restrictions) on collecting contact information from leads. It has certainly affected the bottom line of companies like Facebook and Google, but they can afford to take the hit, not all startups can. I'm not really disagree that companies "should" do it. But…
I'll take my data being protected over your ability to scale any day, and remember, if a US company wants to do business with EU citizens they still need to comply.
But unlike EU startups, US startups have the advantage of only having to to comply with EU regulation when they're at scale and profitable.
I actually like GDPR and would love it if it was made law worldwide, but right now that's not the case and with being EU only it comes at the cost of EU tech. And if the EU wishes to remain economically competitive with the US in the coming decades we're going to need tech and GDPR is yet another hurdle preventing us from achieve this.
Again, I'm not really arguing what should be, but from a purely pragmatic perspective I'd argue tech regulation isn't good for the already struggling economy of the EU.
It's a very small cost that all companies should already be able to handle if they're to be trusted with personal data.
It's absolutely not a small cost. It cost the last startup I worked for around two weeks of development time, plus in many cases it prevents us (or adds massive restrictions) on collecting contact information from leads. It has certainly affected the bottom line of companies like Facebook and Google, but they can afford to take the hit, not all startups can. I'm not really disagree that companies "should" do it. But…
"My back alley butcher shop startup had to spend two weeks developing new methods because of unfair health regulations!"