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How GDPR Will Change The Way You Develop

smashingmagazine.com

411–420 of 710 posts

Re: How GDPR Will Change The Way You Develop

#411
post #214

I really don't think (and I am developer, I will need to comply) that anything in GDPR is hard to understand. Treat data from others in same way as you would treat (and you are treating) yours. You are not selling your personal details to 3rd parties, you are not keeping painfull pictures of yourself climbing to garbage bin and doing diving completely drunk, you are not storing them into pastebin or unsecured databas…

It's not easy at all to understand. I'm a developer and have spent 40+ hours in meetings with lawyers because the interpretation of the law isn't easy at all. There is a whole team of lawyers looking into this. 40% of my team is working on GDPR implementation. Just figuring out if users are allowed to use my service is hard. There is a different age of consent in different EU countries, and apparently some haven't ev…

To be honest, I can't imagine a situation in which I would need a new law in order to have follow age of consent laws. Like, you are really complaining that if a user says they're underage, you have to treat them as such? Or that if you operate in multiple countries you have to look up the relevant laws? All of this seems like a basic requirement, and I'm honestly shocked that it was never an issue before.

Re: How GDPR Will Change The Way You Develop

#412
post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The collective economic effect of that will be massive. Please do. And realize that you are ceding the single largest market to your competition. That doesn't necessarily follow. For example, EU but non-UK customers represent only a small fraction of the user base for one of my businesses. With hindsight, we would have done better to exclude those customers entirely, avoid spending time and money complying with ever-…

It might be that the EU willingly rejects certain business. Maybe, if you aren't GDPR compliant, you are not wanted by the EU.

It's crazy how many businesses think they're so awesome that no market would ever think they're better off without them.

Re: How GDPR Will Change The Way You Develop

#413
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say marginal, but it is a lot easier to implement GDPR if you do it up-front, from day one. If you start off with a policy of just not collecting or storing information unless you've made a conscious decision that you really do need it, that's a huge start. From there, you your main obligations are to ensure that any personal data you do collect can be deleted at a reasonably granular level, and that you d…

Besides implementation costs, you're simply leaving money on the table. You can make lots of profit by selling user's tertiary preference data, often enough to buoy for a few months. It's ridiculous that some Europeans are forcing us to give up money for some fee-fees.

I'm pretty happy about that, and I think most other consumers are too.

Re: How GDPR Will Change The Way You Develop

#414
post #178
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your company is not targeting the EU as a market you are out of scope of GDPR. If you explicitly accept Sterling/Euros, provide localisations for EU countries, talk explicitly about your EU shipping options etc. then you would probably be seen as accommodating the EU market and might find yourself in scope.

Consider the case of an EU citizen traveling in the US transaction in USD. This person is covered. Even if they are in the US.

You're gonna have to provide a citation for that.

Re: How GDPR Will Change The Way You Develop

#415
post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only it was that easy. A reasonable reading of GDPR makes standard web server logs (which contain IP addresses) a punishable offense, even if you don’t have a nexus in Europe. GDPR is a wonderful idea that will be insanely expensive to comply with, act as a continuous drag on developing new technologies, and end up offering only nominal protection to end users. This is just going to be another way for EU regulator…

Of all the wonderful things that we're capable of as technologists, I think we can figure out a way to strip raw-IP addresses from log-files once we don't need them any more. I'll need to figure out to handle this on the data I'm responsible for at the moment. It's boring and it doesn't help the product, but it's not supposed to. In idlewords' terms, I feel like I'm finally purging toxic waste: http://idlewords.com/t…

It's left ambiguous, but it's likely that any aggregate computed from personal data may also be considered personal data (i.e. how many unique IPs you've seen).

Re: How GDPR Will Change The Way You Develop

#416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but like with all this stuff: Your intent to comply with the law carries a lot more weight than actual compliance in edge cases.

That's not very comforting when your goal is avoid having unforeseen problems like being arrested on your European vacation due to violating a law that doesn't apply to your country but you still violated because it applies to all EU citizens regardless of their geographical location.

If you're that worried, then stop scooping up every bit of data you find. Start asking if you actually need it.

Re: How GDPR Will Change The Way You Develop

#417
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comparison is disingenuous. The internet makes anything you build automatically global. You're blasting software engineers for not knowing worldwide regulations. How many New York lawyers know the regulations of France? How many local UK construction companies know the building codes of Japan? None. Knowing all regulations in the world for any given industry would be a full time job. The people you seem to be imp…

Your reasoning sounds like an easy excuse to not bother looking at any regulations period. Because knowing every single regulation is too onerous and you probably know all your local ones intuitively, right?

[deleted]

Re: How GDPR Will Change The Way You Develop

#418
post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What European legislation is that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive Apparently no longer in effect (overthrown)

Yes, it was. Also, in case it wasn't clear, that rule only applied to communications services, not your average website.

Re: How GDPR Will Change The Way You Develop

#419

I wonder if we will see a kind of dual universe privacy in implementations once countries like China become equal as a market for internet services, and they create some sort of a reverse GDPR law. Then for all customers from the EU you will have to completely anonymize and protect all data to the last bit, while for Chinese customers you'll have to implement the most rigid and total tracking possible?

Perhaps separate subsidiaries for the EU, which does respect the GDPR, and one for China, which tracks everything that could be tracked?

Re: How GDPR Will Change The Way You Develop

#420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the user wanted privacy, they wouldn't be giving data to our services. It's a bit ridiculous to punish us for keeping what users freely give us.

It's not given freely unless consent is given, which in most cases it isn't.

You're referring to express consent. However, the user is granting implied consent - they're the ones visiting our website, they're the ones requesting our images and executing our javascript, and they're the ones filling out our forms. We're not forcing them to do any of these things.
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