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Silicon Valley is terrified of California’s privacy law

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Re: Silicon Valley is terrified of California’s privacy law

#171

Post by mdavidn »

calithrowaway wrote: post #166

How is this not a violation to the first amendment? Does the first amendment not extend as follows: (?) As a citizen don't I have the right to create a business and privately take notes on whatever I'd like to about my customers? If i run a dry cleaners and take notes about my customers, should I be obligated to disclose these notes or even the existence of these notes to my customers? I don't see why extending the d…

IANAL, but I think a human needs to be involved in the individuals' processing as a prerequisite to "speech." An automated process has no Constitutional rights.

Re: Silicon Valley is terrified of California’s privacy law

#172

Post by darawk »

nabnob wrote: post #52

I see a lot of comments deriding this law, can someone explain to me why these are bad things? Quoting from this article - https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/28/landmark-california-privac... - Businesses must disclose what information they collect, what business purpose they do so for and any third parties they share that data with. - Businesses would be required to comply with official consumer requests to delete that d…

> - Consumers can opt out of their data being sold, and businesses can’t retaliate by changing the price or level of service.

This is something I object to. It's just fundamentally stupid and doesn't make sense. The entire premise of free exchange is that I give you my services in exchange for something of value of yours. Making it illegal to withhold services if you don't give up your data is crazy. The only reason those services are being provided at all is to get that data. That's effectively a requirement that people provide services for free.

EDIT: I'll also add that it strongly favors incumbent tech companies, by explicitly carving out "selling to third parties" as a disfavored tactic. Google can monetize your data internally. Your average startup may not be able to. Specifically carving out "selling to third parties" favors large, incumbent players over small startups. But then, regulation always does.

Re: Silicon Valley is terrified of California’s privacy law

#173

Post by JohnFen »

clay_the_ripper wrote: post #22
mitchdoogle wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The gist of these laws are all the same. Just respect ALL users' data from the start, and you shouldn't have any difficulty with compliance.

Totally disagree. Complicate is not the same thing as following the spirit of the rules. Compliance is proving you followed the rules. Totally different. Also, you have to define what you mean by “respecting privacy”. Something that I do on my website, like basic retargeting marketing for abandoned shopping carts doesn’t feel to me like an invasion of privacy. To you, it might. The rules have to be defined clearly.

> Something that I do on my website, like basic retargeting marketing for abandoned shopping carts doesn’t feel to me like an invasion of privacy.

It sure does to me. So much so that if it happened to me, I'd be sure to never buy from that site again.

Re: Silicon Valley is terrified of California’s privacy law

#174

Post by dsfyu404ed »

mjevans wrote: post #57
ohduran wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Imagine if you said the same thing with taxes. "Gee, why do I have to pay taxes differently in every country?" Well, because that's what you have to do if you want to do business there. You're not forced to do anything in here if you don't want to; if the opportunity is worthy, others will take your place. Same with the laws, especially those that remove agency from the users.

The tax problem could be solved by requiring a shipping manifest, including declared value, and applying taxes at the shipping carrier level. This would make more sense anyway since the delivery carriers have to establish a physical presence.

My machine tooling comes in little padded envelopes with standardized shipping labels that have the customs declaration info. They all say "phone accessories".

If the origin country is not willing to track it back to the source and do enforcement for you and you don't want to categorically block or have invasive monitoring everything from that country then it's a fool's errand. The same goes for websites.

Re: Silicon Valley is terrified of California’s privacy law

#175

Post by NeedMoreTea »

nabnob wrote: post #123
briffle wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see a lot of comments deriding this law, can someone explain to me why these are bad things? Jeff Hammerbacher: ‘The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads… That sucks.’ Those best minds are now having to change the way they generate revenue..

When I first wrote that comment, it was at -2 after three minutes. Which is interesting because usually HN users claim they care about privacy.

Well, going on the endless GDPR discussions last year, that very much depends whether it's a time it's mostly America awake or mostly Europe. There's far too much of SV wedded to the idea of farming customer data infinitely. Which is why data privacy laws are becoming a thing.

Re: Silicon Valley is terrified of California’s privacy law

#176

Post by krapp »

calithrowaway wrote: post #166

How is this not a violation to the first amendment? Does the first amendment not extend as follows: (?) As a citizen don't I have the right to create a business and privately take notes on whatever I'd like to about my customers? If i run a dry cleaners and take notes about my customers, should I be obligated to disclose these notes or even the existence of these notes to my customers? I don't see why extending the d…

>I feel like the state constitution granted right to privacy does not supersede the federally mandated right to freedom of speech

Gonna have to stop you there.

The First Amendment doesn't mandate a right to free speech. It only prevents Congress from passing laws abridging that right.

There's nothing, Constitutionally speaking, preventing states from doing so.

Edit: nope, Apparently I'm wrong on this one.

Re: Silicon Valley is terrified of California’s privacy law

#177

Post by evilantnie »

Jach wrote: post #161
dangus wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the flip side, the downsides of regulations don’t outweigh their utility. We don’t scrap seatbelt and airbag regulations just because they’ve had some unintended side effects. Regulations aren’t set in stone forever, either, and a functional legislative body can always modify and update them as their effects become more well known. Or, well, maybe I sound too idealistic. But...I think most of us can all agree that…

I live in Washington and this is the last year I'll have to do emissions testing for my vehicle registration. I'm still kind of amazed (my default is pessimism) that this was put into motion in 2005 and nothing seems to be in the way of stopping the removal of the requirement next year: https://ecology.wa.gov/Air-Climate/Air-quality/Vehicle-emiss... My only point is to support your case that it's not always idealisti…

I was also surprised by this when I first saw it, but if you read the reasoning behind the ending of the program, it kind of makes sense. It sounds like they are just switching their focus.

The emissions check program is aimed at carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, and particulate pollution. Properly functioning emissions systems ensure a vehicle operates efficiently, but the effect on a car or truck's overall greenhouse gas emissions is fairly small - and it is greenhouse gases (primarily carbon dioxide) that are driving climate change.

Vehicles are still the largest source of carbon pollution in Washington. We are working to change that by making sure new cars are more efficient than old ones, supporting zero-emission vehicles and cleaner fuels, and advancing transit, ridesharing and other alternatives to single occupancy vehicles.

we expect air quality to continue to improve as older vehicles are replaced with newer, cleaner cars. Ecology will continue to monitor air quality conditions throughout Washington. If we see any reasons for concern, we will certainly take action.

Re: Silicon Valley is terrified of California’s privacy law

#178

Post by paulmd »

lacampbell wrote: post #170
dangus wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the flip side, the downsides of regulations don’t outweigh their utility. We don’t scrap seatbelt and airbag regulations just because they’ve had some unintended side effects. Regulations aren’t set in stone forever, either, and a functional legislative body can always modify and update them as their effects become more well known. Or, well, maybe I sound too idealistic. But...I think most of us can all agree that…

The US scrapped alcohol prohibition due to its unintended side effects, and is increasingly scrapping marijuana prohibitions. Often the downsides do outweigh their utility.

"Someone passed a bad law once, therefore all laws are bad."

Guess we don't need food safety laws anymore, prohibition was bad!

Surely you can understand the difference between prohibition and consumer-protection laws? They aren't even like, the same field of laws.

Re: Silicon Valley is terrified of California’s privacy law

#179

Post by paggle »

nabnob wrote: post #52

I see a lot of comments deriding this law, can someone explain to me why these are bad things? Quoting from this article - https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/28/landmark-california-privac... - Businesses must disclose what information they collect, what business purpose they do so for and any third parties they share that data with. - Businesses would be required to comply with official consumer requests to delete that d…

Regulations that don’t achieve anything create a massive drag on innovation and commerce. Every regulation is a compliance check that needs to be paid for, a lawyer that needs to be hired, etc. which advantages incumbents.

It’s like lines of code in a program — each one makes the application worse, so each one should have a purpose that it achieves.

Re: Silicon Valley is terrified of California’s privacy law

#180

Post by chobeat »

ptest1 wrote: post #163

Besides the tremendous onus laws like this may place on small startups and side projects: Does anyone know how companies are supposed to comply if “user data” literally cannot be deleted? I’m thinking in the case of blockchain type applications, where one users’ actions feed into another users’ actions, and you can’t deleted user A’s actions without deleting potentially tons of other stuff and destroying the applicat…

For the 1) you just don't commit data in the blockchain itself. You can commit an ID that points to external data and drop these external data if requested. This clearly looks like an anti-pattern but putting personal data in an immutable data structure is an anti-pattern too, since those data don't belong to you.

What if a bank put the gold of their customers in a concrete pillar instead of a vault? Fuck the back, I guess. I don't see why not.

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