Study: Google is the biggest beneficiary of the GDPR • Hacker News Board

Re: Study: Google is the biggest beneficiary of the GDPR

#51

Post by kristianc » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 10:59 AM UTC

Drakim wrote: post #32

kristianc wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t have a GMail account, though, as there’s no such thing as a GMail account. You have a Google account, and GMail is bundled in as a service. FWIW - ‘tracked all over the world on every website’ also comes with some significant caveats.

Nothing about what you are saying here is related to my point though. If I use one product of google, it does not mean they have a "business relationship" that entitles them to tracking me as a third party on random websites. And even if it somehow did, I could merely opt to not be part of that, and neither the website nor google can deny me service for opting out. That's one of the main aspects of GDPR, you can't ma…

If you’re using a signed in Google Account or a signed in Chrome Browser, Google will argue that the tracking is compatible with the services that you have agreed to as it helps provide a more personalized experience.

Re: Study: Google is the biggest beneficiary of the GDPR

#52

Post by raziel414 » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 10:59 AM UTC

I'm not surprised. I used to work on a team at Google that had to deal with GDPR (I still work at Google, but on a different team), and we had to get legal review for a lot use-cases. For example, we had a backup system that took snapshots of our user-provided data. If a user requested their data be purged, should we purge all the backups as well?

Since we had legal counsel in house, it wasn't too terrible. For a smaller company that doesn't have those resources though, GDPR compliance must have been a huge burden.

Re: Study: Google is the biggest beneficiary of the GDPR

#53

Post by DomreiRoam » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 10:59 AM UTC

seszett wrote: post #37

TekMol wrote: post #20

Plus it knocked a lot of potential competitors off the internet. I know multiple young startups and entrepreneurs in Europe that killed their projects/ideas because the additional burden of coping with GDPR was too much for them.

I've read that many times here, but it's weird because I don't know any. None of my neighbours, clients or partners have had any significant problems with GDPR, in a kinda large tech complex in France (with about 300 startups, though of course I don't interact with all of them). Maybe you mostly have relations with startups that work in the ad industry?

In France, the CNIL did already enforce constrains on data management. The GDPR could be seen has an enhancement of current constrains/laws.

Re: Study: Google is the biggest beneficiary of the GDPR

#54

Post by Angostura » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 10:59 AM UTC

From the final paragraph of the article

> In the end, users should never only rely on laws and regulations such as the GDPR to protect their privacy. Instead, they should be aware of who they are providing which data to.

Ignoring the fact that GDPR is primarily a regulation ensuring that they know who they are providing which data to, and ensuring they have a choice about providing it.

Re: Study: Google is the biggest beneficiary of the GDPR

#55

Post by tpush » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 11:00 AM UTC

Yeah, I wouldn't trust this source on anything privacy related.

They present themselves as user privacy champions but primarily make money via, you guessed it, advertisements.

They are owned by Burda, a large German media organization who, again, make money by advertisement and processing of their user's data.

"We’re breaking new grounds when it comes to developing our business model. Bringing together targeting and privacy, we are currently testing a technology which allows companies and brands to show you relevant offers directly in the browser."[0]

[0] https://cliqz.com/en/about

Re: Study: Google is the biggest beneficiary of the GDPR

#56

Post by Angostura » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 11:00 AM UTC

raziel414 wrote: post #52

I'm not surprised. I used to work on a team at Google that had to deal with GDPR (I still work at Google, but on a different team), and we had to get legal review for a lot use-cases. For example, we had a backup system that took snapshots of our user-provided data. If a user requested their data be purged, should we purge all the backups as well? Since we had legal counsel in house, it wasn't too terrible. For a sma…

You know what? It's only a huge burden for organisations that process a lot of personal data in a variety of interesting ways.

Re: Study: Google is the biggest beneficiary of the GDPR

#57

Post by jansan » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 11:04 AM UTC

What I am still missing from Google is a clear instruction that explains how to adjust the Analytics settings to be 100% compliant with GDPR. The fact that this is missing made me decide to drop Google Analytics in the foreseeable future.

Re: Study: Google is the biggest beneficiary of the GDPR

#58

Post by oytis » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 11:06 AM UTC

anoncake wrote: post #50

oytis wrote: post #33

Über-fucking-raschung. Regulation is beneficial to big companies.

Meanwhile, little players like looks at diagram Facebook lose.

Too much has happened to Facebook recently to really assert connection of decline with GDPR.

Re: Study: Google is the biggest beneficiary of the GDPR

#59

Post by nbardy » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 11:08 AM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #25

yardstick wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One nasty side effect is some large organisations are shutting out Europe. I can no longer access severs popular US based sites and instead get messages about the content not being available in your region. (Most recently: latimes.con and fox8.com)

That's also fine - was their content worth your privacy? If they can't be GDPR compliant we don't want them.

If you didn't think their content was worth it you didn't have to visit. Now no one can.

Re: Study: Google is the biggest beneficiary of the GDPR

#60

Post by nwellnhof » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 11:13 AM UTC

brennebeck wrote: post #26

nwellnhof wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It doesn't matter what the user consents to That's not entirely true. If a user really consents to being tracked for advertising purposes, the GDPR allows tracking. Whether the consent banners inform users honestly about the extent of tracking is another question. I think they don't. What's worse is that Google still tracks users by default, even if they never visited an actual Google property, let alone have a Goo…

Somewhat tangential: have you seen GitLab’s notice? And what’s your opinion of that style, as far as informing/consent?

GitLab seems to use the Cookiebot solution. I like that "Marketing" cookies are disabled by default, although they should be labeled as "Advertising". Also, even if you bother to read the purposes of all the 80 advertising cookies, the descriptions are incomplete and dishonest. For example:

Doubleclick cookie notice: "Used by Google DoubleClick to register and report the website user's actions after viewing or clicking one of the advertiser's ads with the purpose of measuring the efficacy of an ad and to present targeted ads to the user."

Facebook cookie notice: "Used by Facebook to deliver a series of advertisement products such as real time bidding from third party advertisers."

These descriptions fail to mention that the collected data will be combined with information from thousands of other websites you visit which allows to create sophisticated user profiles. From these profiles, you can infer things like gender, age, socio-economic status, interests, or hobbies with relatively high accuracy. Even if you asked them, Google and Facebook couldn't tell which hidden categories their machine learning models can discover.