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Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

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Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#551
post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A major difference with regulations is there’s no guaranteed executor of those metaphorical lines of code. If the law gets enforced, then yes, but if nobody enforces it, it loses meaning.

The worst possibility is selective enforcement.

There's a reason we call them judges. Selective enforcement is there for a reason. Lawmakers can't anticipated everything. Just look at how bad of an idea zero tolerance policies in schools have been with thinks like getting expelled for biting a sandwich into the shape of a gun.

The world isn't black and white. Flexibility, including selective enforcement, is necessary in a just system.

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hackers should know the government is never on your side.

That is an absolute nonsense. At minimum, government will be useful as defence against worse government. I know that some anarchist had dream of a stateless world, but it is not viable. And while I am not going to say that any government is ideal, many are better than USSR, Third Reich or Cambodia under Pol Pot.

Government != state.

And the enemy of your enemy is not your friend. It can be a temporary ally, but you always have to be wary of it becoming strong enough because you can become its enemy tomorrow.

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those “cookie banners” are nonsense aimed at getting this outcome. This is a loss for European citizens and small businesses and a win for the trillion dollar ecosystem of data abuse.

How can you comply with the current requirements without cookie banners? Why would EU governments use cookie banners if they are just nonsense meant to degrade approval of GDPR?

See this article by GitHub about how they removed cookie banners: https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/no-cookie-for...

    EU law requires you to use cookie banners if your website contains cookies that are not required for it to work. Common examples of such cookies are those used by third-party analytics, tracking, and advertising services.

     [...] we find cookie banners quite irritating, so we decided to look for a solution. After a brief search, we found one: just don’t use any non-essential cookies. Pretty simple, really.

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#554
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the last few years I think sentiment on hacker news has shifted from libertarian leaning to much mored left leaning. The same happened on Reddit a few years before. Anyway, just my gut feeling, nothing scientific.

I find it really hard to classify myself. I've always called myself a "libertarian" - I believe the best strategy to Civilization is to maximise freedom for anyone. As freedom enables enlightenment an enlightenment drives progress. To actually achieve that, in the real world, means that you have to distribute and limit power. That means limiting not only government power but also corporate power. That means regulatio…

This isn't actually unusual in the grand scheme of things, just at the moment. "Libertarian" was originally a word that anarchists came up with to describe themselves for a good reason. Lysander Spooner is famous in right-wing libertarian circles, but the guy also promoted mutualism and was the member of the First International. Today, what you describe goes under the label of "libertarian free-market socialism".

Regarding regulation, I do have to note that in many cases when you try to root-cause corporate power, it turns out that it hinges on active government regulation in practice. For example, consider the fundamentals of capitalism, namely, accumulation of capital. Why do we get those huge monopolies in the first place? Well, because more capital means more way to generate wealth (or, more precisely, to appropriate wealth generated by your workers), which can be invested into more capital etc - there is a natural positive feedback loop here. So at a first glance it feels like you need government to actively do something to prevent companies from becoming too large. But consider: what does it mean for a company to own something? It's not a person, so it can't really have physical possession of things. It's all abstract property rights, and the only reason why that works is because the society as a whole acknowledges those rights and legitimate, and, crucially, because there is a state providing infrastructure (police, courts etc) to enforce them. Now imagine what would happen if, for example, the state simply refused to acknowledge property rights past a certain limit and simply wouldn't enforce them on behalf of the property owners.

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#555
post #233
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I really want to see is Meta getting irrelevant ON MERIT. That's impossible. The network effects are too strong. Facebook may die, or even Instagram, but WhatsApp is so intermeshed with the majority of the world that it can only be taken out by a government.

I uninstalled WhatsApp last year after I sent a message to my most important contacts that I'm switching to Signal. In the mean time, I convinced a grand total of 2 people to install Signal so we can talk. Also, I realized that actually not being part in some of the WhatsApp groups that I left behind has quite a lot of advantages! Yes, the network effects are very strong, but each of us has the possibility of making…

You might have convinced 2 people to install Signal, but the real test is whether they will still be using it a year from now. My own experience from going Signal-first for a while was that it doesn't stick for most.

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst possibility is selective enforcement.

There's a reason we call them judges. Selective enforcement is there for a reason. Lawmakers can't anticipated everything. Just look at how bad of an idea zero tolerance policies in schools have been with thinks like getting expelled for biting a sandwich into the shape of a gun. The world isn't black and white. Flexibility, including selective enforcement, is necessary in a just system.

The reason that selective enforcement exists is that it is very hard to avoid having rules selectively enforced.

But the history of selective enforcement strongly suggests that it does not usually lead to just results. It is often instead something that unaccountable officials find themselves easily able to exploit for questionable purposes.

For a notable example, witness how selective enforcement during the War on Drugs was used to justify mass incarceration of blacks, even though actual rates of drug usage were similar in black and white communities.

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is accurate, however if you look at any thread you can see an overwhelming consensus of opinion. The diversity of views are not equal - in the sense that there isnt equal number of for and against comments. In most of the threads I have observed about EU action on Big Tech, the overwhelming majority of thoughts are 'for', with perhaps few dissenting thoughts.

It depends what time of the day you log in too. I'm in the GMT time zone, I can literally see a comment go from +20 upvotes in the morning to negative numbers when Americans start waking up. It really shifts your perspective of the site too, because comments move down or even disappear based on the number of votes.

I would strongly encourage everyone to read HN with `showdead` enabled (it's in your profile page). There aren't actually all that many downvoted comments, and while mosts are low-level trolling, even with `showdead` you see them at the end of the parent thread and they are greyed out, so it's not all that distracting. But being able to see some of the things that get downvoted / killed unjustly (and then vouch & upvote them) is how you get a better HN.

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#558
post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GDPR allows for essential cookies with no popup. Implied consent is valid for most functionality, just not selling peoples tracking data or giving it to a third party who could. Its entirely possible to have no pop-up. Someone once told me they wanted one anyway because it made the site seem more legitimate than if I removed it (the only thing I would have needed to change was the embedded video from youtube and I co…

embedding youtube is enough to be non-cookiebanner-compliant??

We went the route inspired by gamingonlinux.com

So anywhere there is a YouTube embed we instead display a static thumbnail with 2 inline buttons underneath. 1 button to accept cookies and then load the embed and 1 button to view the video directly on YouTube in a new tab.

It works nicely and also pushed us to switch most of our videos to being first party hosted instead of YouTube.

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#559
post #16

Incredible to see the 180 both from EU and also from the HN sentiment. HN was cheering on as EU went after Big Tech companies, especially Meta. Meta is no perfect company, but the amount of 'please stick it to them' was strong (I reckon that is still a bridge too far for a lot of folks here). Even extreme proponents of big tech villanery in the US (Lina Khan's FTC) is also facing losses (They just lost their monument…

I live in EU. I am totally in support to force Meta down through government's big stick. While they are at it, I hope they do it to the other big techs too. Being a "hacker type" (whatever that means) does not equate to being complacent to these companies abusing their economic power.

I'm a hacker type and generally extremely (left) libertarian. But when it comes to megacorps, I have basically zero sympathy. When they are big enough to rival nation-states in economic and political power, they can't complain when said nation-states start to notice.

(I would still prefer the world without either, though.)

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI should also be seen as an opportunity for small actors to actually understand and follow numerous complex rules. You don't need a huge legal and compliance team anymore, you just need to feed chatgpt the right amount of legal and ruling documentation, and then consult it on how you can actually comply.

HAHAHAHA good joke. Oh wait. You're serious. Oh god please no.

We're already at the point where lawyers are submitting AI-generated videos as court evidence, so...
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