511–520 of 1001 posts
The EU privacy regulations seem to have a side effect of creating a de facto EU internet, where EU competitors can become dominant because they pay closer attention to changes in law vs north american or chinese counterparts. It’s almost like a more subtle version of china or russia’s firewall
I think we (in the EU) will soon realise the bizarre consequences of these regulations. European startups will not be able to use standard SaaS or PaaS tools (like AWS, Azure, Mailchimp, PayPal etc) if they are based in the US (like most of them are). No cloud services, no Office 365 or Google Workspace. It will take forever to build up a similar ecosystem in Europe and I think most successful European entrepreneurs…
It is also silly to tolerate techs incessant fuckery.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that the case for any data that is passed into the USA then rather than just GA? So if I hosted my servers in any of the AWS US regions that too would be illegal if they have any personal data in them. In this case personal data is a randomised unique id. So say I have a table of users and all I have is a username and a password and a unique id for the record that's personal data and the customer is not allowed to…
a randomised unique ID and username/password are not personal data if they can't be used to identify a person. IF you associate that uniqueID or username with something that can identify the user (like IP/ Personal name etc) than yes it's illegal for you to store that data in US even with the consent of the user.
So any US company cannot store PII on an EU citizen? If someone from the EU comes to my site to make a purchase, I can't allow them to do that?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, and when you go shopping and pay with cash in a store with no surveillance, your shopping habits are being shared against your wishes with a random third party (the external company bookkeeper). It's disingenuous to have problems with websites collecting entirely anonymous browsing data -- that goes beyond any arguments for privacy and just steers into "yelling at clouds" territory.
GDPR also applies to the real world. That store is definitely not allowed to share data about your shopping habits with some third party without your explicit consent. For example government departments in Germany have to aks for your explicit permission beforehand if they need to request/share data with a different department.
I think we (in the EU) will soon realise the bizarre consequences of these regulations. European startups will not be able to use standard SaaS or PaaS tools (like AWS, Azure, Mailchimp, PayPal etc) if they are based in the US (like most of them are). No cloud services, no Office 365 or Google Workspace. It will take forever to build up a similar ecosystem in Europe and I think most successful European entrepreneurs…
>I think we (in the EU) will soon realise the bizarre consequences of these regulations. Could this not also be said about US regulations such as CLOUD act, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and Executive Order 12333. I don't think it's accurate to solely blame the EU when this is in response to legislation that gives/gave the US access to all types of personal data on European citizens.
I would argue that the Americans getting better privacy protections and working with other countries instead of forcing American companies to behave illegally abroad would be a much better solution than the Europeans watering down their privacy laws.
American companies will set up independent shell companies or subsidiaries to serve European customers anyway. Microsoft and Amazon are never going to voluntary leave a market of 400M customers. Doing so would leave too much room for a competitor to grow and then threaten them. So if fragmenting the web means that Europeans get the same services as Americans, but with better privacy, then I am all for it.
Europeans are to blame for the flaws in the GDPR, not for doing their thing without the blessing of the Americans.
I think we (in the EU) will soon realise the bizarre consequences of these regulations. European startups will not be able to use standard SaaS or PaaS tools (like AWS, Azure, Mailchimp, PayPal etc) if they are based in the US (like most of them are). No cloud services, no Office 365 or Google Workspace. It will take forever to build up a similar ecosystem in Europe and I think most successful European entrepreneurs…
Shaking up the current situation doesn't seem to be an entirely bad thing. As it stands, the majority of the internet is depending/residing on datacenters provided by a handful of companies. I'm not sure that's a good thing. Building satisfactory alternatives to Office, Workspaces etc. isn't a monumental task by any stretch. With the sudden demand that you predict, they'll spring up like weeds. This might be ham-fist…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting that you mention localStorage. If the web-page's javascript ONLY stores and processes data stored in the client's localStorage to generate the local page, and sends nothing back to the server, so the web-site operator never sees that data, then is the web-site operator processing that data, or is it only the user-agent's operator ? The web-site operator certainly wouldn't be a "data controller" since it i…
Never thought about that scenario, I only mentioned localStorage or sessionStorage because it has been abused in the past to get around tracking blockers and to create "supercookies".
Me: "Effectively, in my case, the user is adding 'post-it' notes of their own devising that remain 'sticky' so the next time they visit the same page they'll see their own notes - but those notes are never sent to the server"
Me: "It's effectively the same circumstance as a classical computer program being downloaded by the user, and then used (locally) to create/save files on their local device. In that case you wouldn't consider the author of the computer program to be the data controller, surely?"
ICO (Flynn): "Flynn: Okay that sounds reasonable." ICO (Flynn): "So if your product/service is not dependant on personal data and you are not processing it then you appear to not be captured by data protection legislation."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The Austrian Data Protection Authority (DSB) [3] ruled differently and waived most of the arguments raised by Google. The DSB ruled that even anonymized IP addresses are personal data. Why are anonymised IP addresses still considered "Personal Data"? Is it because Google is doing the anonymisation?
I guess it depends what "anonymised IP address" means. If it's still possible to correlate data from visitors across different websites, they might as well log IP addresses directly.
0: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2763052?hl=en
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Rest is just making life of web developers/admins/tech company owners harder. Seriously? People spend tons money and time to track users. If you want to be GDPR-compliant, simply don't save unnecessary userdata and if you still feel the urge to do so, give users the option to control it. It's that easy. Any problems you get from it are of your own making. > Especially with these European intentions I frankly believ…
Many just want analytics and GA is the most convenient option. Though with GDPR now website owners (many offering free content and hosting a site where a user explicity browses into with their own will) need to learn law to make sure they are compliant, which obviously shouldn't be the case for such a simple task. I'm not going into anyone's house and force them to give me their data, I'm collection anonymous data fr…
The problem is that we made collecting user data the easy task while ignoring privacy protection. The fact that Google spend billions to make spying easy does not mean it should be legal. And it's really easy to be compliant - don't collect data. You don't need it to host your website, you really don't.
> I'm not going into anyone's house and force them to give me their data, I'm collection anonymous data from people who, with their own will, visit my website/use my service. Don't want me to collect your anonymous data? Sure, don't visit my site/use my service then. No one forces anyone. Regulating what tech I can use on my own website? This is ridiculous.
And you're absolutely free to ask people for consent for collecting their data or to simply block visitors from the European union. You can also not collect data or do so in compliance with the GDPR, by the way. All ways are perfectly viable.
But just because I opened a link in my browser does not mean I consent to anything - by that logic, ransomware is perfectly fine, because you visited their website and downloaded their software. This is ridiculous.
I think we (in the EU) will soon realise the bizarre consequences of these regulations. European startups will not be able to use standard SaaS or PaaS tools (like AWS, Azure, Mailchimp, PayPal etc) if they are based in the US (like most of them are). No cloud services, no Office 365 or Google Workspace. It will take forever to build up a similar ecosystem in Europe and I think most successful European entrepreneurs…
>I think we (in the EU) will soon realise the bizarre consequences of these regulations. Could this not also be said about US regulations such as CLOUD act, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and Executive Order 12333. I don't think it's accurate to solely blame the EU when this is in response to legislation that gives/gave the US access to all types of personal data on European citizens.