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

politico.eu

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

#151

Post by ivan_gammel »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #139
ivan_gammel wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 experienc…

This kind of line of thinking assumes a couple of things: 1. People are doing things the “wrong” way in the first place. It’s already been established that compliance isn’t hard if you are doing things the “right” way. 2. Compliance is hard. It really isn’t if you are doing things already the right way Ultimately GDPR is not the problem, it’s people getting into tech that either have no understanding or respect for t…

> I expect the plumber to instead pay someone

This is fundamentally wrong expectation. To preserve the spirit of EU charter one does not need the law where every business engaging with customers online has to pay a compliance tax to another medieval guild of experts.

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

#152

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #151
SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of line of thinking assumes a couple of things: 1. People are doing things the “wrong” way in the first place. It’s already been established that compliance isn’t hard if you are doing things the “right” way. 2. Compliance is hard. It really isn’t if you are doing things already the right way Ultimately GDPR is not the problem, it’s people getting into tech that either have no understanding or respect for t…

> I expect the plumber to instead pay someone This is fundamentally wrong expectation. To preserve the spirit of EU charter one does not need the law where every business engaging with customers online has to pay a compliance tax to another medieval guild of experts.

Do you do your own structural engineering or do you pay someone to do it who is qualified to do so in the EU? Structural engineering compliance is a medieval guild of experts, is it not?

Do you practice your own medicine in the EU or do you pay someone to do it? Medical compliance is a medieval guild of experts, is it not?

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

#153

Post by ryandrake »

snackbroken wrote: post #143
ryandrake wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

On a site like HN you'd expect a significant proportion of people to be willfully ignorant and/or make excuses about this stuff because it helps them sleep at night. I have been suspecting for a while that the "consent" escape hatch was a concession to get GDPR past the advertising industry's army of lobbyists. Making the problem in-your-face-visible is hopefully only the first step in garnering support from the publ…

Silicon Valley has such an antagonistic view of user consent and user control, and when they're forced to acknowledge and respect it, they do it in the most tantrum-y, malicious-compliance way they can. It's like the Bob's Burgers meme: "OK, Fine. But I'm gonna complain the whole time."

Ironically, if these companies didn't choose to make their consent UX so deliberately hostile and in-your-face, we might never have had this much visibility into how big of a problem it is.

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

#154

Post by andrewla »

Rygian wrote: post #142
andrewla wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's cute. Worth noting first that this is not really the GDPR (nobody here has said that it is directly, but in other threads people are making that assumption), this is the ePrivacy Directive (which is probably what the EU should be revising in light of these universally hated popups). The EU hands out arbitrary fines to large companies that range in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and ask companies to compl…

I honestly don't see how your comment makes sense. Tt's the GDPR (published in 2016) that mandates that consent must be freely given. Using a 2002 directive to justify your point is disingenuous. You could have selected instead the 2020 guidelines [1] that are extremely detailed and address this point explicitly: [quote]Example 17: A data controller may also obtain explicit consent from a visitor to its website by of…

I mean, have you ever had to deal with regulators? Departing from industry norms will 100% be used against you in any regulatory proceeding, no matter how minor. It is naive to think otherwise. Regulators go after big pockets and

The guidelines you link to are advisory, not legal, and they trace back to the ePrivacy regulations (although the notion of "consent" was modified by the GDPR; it's not clear which interpretation applies -- ePrivacy regulations, which are still in effect, also require consent). "The obligation is on controllers to innovate to find new solutions that operate within the parameters of the law and better support the protection of personal data and the interests of data subjects." This is standard boilerplate shit that says "you have to follow the regulations, not whatever is in this doc".

I honestly don't know what to tell you. The cookie popups are an offense in every possible way; they fail to accomplish their intended purposes, they burden users with useless interactions that provide no protection, and they burden website developers with useless busywork to document compliance to hopefully avoid retaliatory punitive fines if you draw the attention of regulators or EU officials. That these policies find supporters on HN of all places is beyond my comprehension.

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

#155

Post by abdullahkhalids »

Epa095 wrote: post #32
arrty88 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a) do away with the worthless cookie banners requirement i recommend everyone gets the chrome plugin that auto accepts these banners so you never have to see them again

Can it auto-reject them?

I have a Firefox extension that deletes all cookies after I close all tabs related to a site.

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

#156

Post by abdullahkhalids »

phh wrote: post #16
terminalbraid wrote: post #4

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. Interesting timing with the digital sovereignty movement.

> do away with the worthless cookie banners requirement There is no such requirement. You're free to make a website that doesn't require cookies. This very website on which we're discussing doesn't have a cookie banner, and isn't required to have one. (I'm not saying HN is GDPR compliant though, it's missing a DPO mail address to allow edit/deletion of older PII messages and a privacy policy even though said policy w…

> (I'm not saying HN is GDPR compliant though, it's missing a DPO mail address to allow edit/deletion of older PII messages and a privacy policy even though said policy would probably be max 10 lines)

The privacy policy is here [1], linked in the footer. It also very clearly says: "For deletion requests, please contact us at privacy@ycombinator.com.".

[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/

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

#157

Post by pabs3 »

milesrout wrote: post #127
pabs3 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Browsers should be the things handling cookies, not websites.

They already are.

They definitely aren't cookie opt-in popups in any browser. Nor is there coarse-grained cookie management, like what websites implement. Nor fine-grained cookie management, like they should have.

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

#158

Post by milesrout »

pabs3 wrote: post #157
milesrout wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They already are.

They definitely aren't cookie opt-in popups in any browser. Nor is there coarse-grained cookie management, like what websites implement. Nor fine-grained cookie management, like they should have.

Be the change you want to see in the world. It is supposed to be a user agent. Instead of imposing this cost on everyone else, if you think it is important to be able to have fine grained control over cookies, make it happen.

Advantages:

1. A single UI in each browser instead of a different one on each website 2. The functionality would be built and maintained by someone with allied rather than adverse interests to the user.

Also you can disable cookies quite easily and whether your UI supports it or not is totally irrelevant anyway. If you use a web browser that sends cookies to websites then that you have authorised it to do so is your responsibility. Use a different browser or don't use one if you don't like it.

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

#159

Post by m463 »

Hojojo wrote: post #35
terminalbraid wrote: post #4

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. Interesting timing with the digital sovereignty movement.

I don't see why small organizations should get to be more careless with my personal data than anybody else. The value of my privacy doesn't change just because of the size of the company.

I wonder if the "modern" war in the ukraine is making people think about privacy.
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