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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

#711
post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with laws that both the enforcer and the subject (enforcee?) agree are bad, is that enforcement is variable. And that leads to corruption. Every damn time.

The fix for corruption is vote the bums out of office. It is not to go whole hog into blind application of the law. Think about how hard it is to write code that has no bugs. Now imagine you're using English and working with a system with so many parameters and side effects that you can't possibly anticipate all eventualities. And now you want to rigidly apply your operators to this parameter space? Selective enforce…

> The fix for corruption is vote the bums out of office.

That doesn’t seem to be working.

I argue there’s an acceptable level of corruption, only the particular flavours change from time to time.

Come out of government better off than when you when in. Fine, good on ya. No need to tells us about how you’re going about it while you’re going about it.

Learn to be at least a little bit discreet, and at least do something occasionally that comes across as good for the average person.

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#712

GDPR was never about privacy, but to legitimise data trade. It was two step process - first train people to Agree to anything by introducing "harmless" Cookie Law, then once people just click Agree to anything, create legal basis for data trade, where it is no longer a grey area as most users give consent. With Chat Controls coming back, never assume EU is doing anything for the benefit of general public. What is par…

GDPR doesn't really work as you describe. Under GDPR data is a liability.

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#713
post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the answer should be self-served, ideally, with an automated authoritative self-served approval. It could have a lag time of a few days or even a week for a person to approve. Apple App Store review is a nightmare but still better than these regulations. They say yes or no clearly. These EU regulations are more like: if you fuck up, you wouldn't know until the sentence might be really really high.

I keep hearing that, but do we actually have stories about small European companies being ruined?

I bet we don't, unless they ruined themselves due to being very negligent or unwilling to implement even after being reported and found out.

The reason is that in the EU fines are usually wrist slaps, compared to the size of the company, not threatening existence. We see this with big tech, who consider violating the law cost of business.

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#714

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 & upv…

You can upvote dead comments? I can't maybe you need to have some amount of karma.

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the solution is clearer rules. What drives compliance costs up is rarely the compliance itself, it's usually the uncertainty about your being in compliance or not. That's also true for tax laws, labor laws, environment laws, almost every safety code out there, building zoning...

I totally agree with this view! I understand why the rules are vague to an extent, simply because it is hard to impossible to cover every aspect of data collection. But the GDPR is super vague on some very technical datapoints as well. Is an IP Address PII? Is there a difference between an IPv4 or an IPv6 address being PII? What constitutes as legitimate interest specifically? Can I use data for legitimate interests…

IP addresses are PII. This has long been determined.

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#716
post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problems are in the details: why are news organizations exempt from this rule in Europe? You can’t read news websites unless you accept all cookies or pay to read. Who decides these things? How is such a rule in favor of privacy? Why is my site where I regularly post news not eligible? Who decides which sites are eligible? It’s these kind of moral double standards and cognitive dissonances that people have to end…

It seems there were lawsuits but "pay to reject" is apparently legal as long as the pay is reasonable. I despise it personally.

If you're under UK law the ICO guidance on "pay to reject" can be found here: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#717
post #322
post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, compliance itself is costly, but the cost is stuff that society decided it wanted to spend money on. But uncertainty in compliance and time spent navigating compliance is nearly pure waste.

To continue a conversation from another thread on another post, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, and out-of-band context required are all costs that just happen to act as moats for entrenched incumbents. And no surprise, such incumbents often have so much influence over politics that they literally write the laws that regulate them. The folksy aphorism goes, The more wild cards and crazy rules, the greater the exp…

Easy to not play the card game, by only collecting the data needed for your service.

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Yeah, I think states need to release that entities as large as them become their competitors. Now we have entities way larger than them.

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users can opt-out by not using the service or buying an ad-free version if available. One would think that developers should not be forced to offer for free a version monetized with 60% less effective ads. And I understand currently this is indeed not the case for small developers, they can offer paid ad-free or free but with personalized ads. Large platforms apparently cannot.

That’s not how the GDPR and cookie laws work at all

That’s how most news websites work in Europe: accept the cookies, or pay.

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#720
Given that they were largely ignored anyways, who cares? Laws have become almost meaningless, in a world where power lies within companies and not governments or the public, which anyways has been trained to either act against their own interest or disillusioned enough to largely don't care.

The only space where there's still laws from people is in the social media world, where the outcome are laws that don't change the life of anything but make you feel good. Eg. minorities, women, etc. still have low income, bad life outlook, etc., but hey now you need to clearly state that the programmer job is also for women and trans people. Assholes can be assholes as long as they use the right pronoun, whole industries thriving on lowering the baseline (delivery, etc.) of what humane treatment at a workplace is celebrate and pinkwashing. Everyone is "happy".

Also on the ecological side. Laws that that would change something fail, but everything that can be exploited in terms of taxation passes - seriously look at summaries on voting on directives. It's completely split at this line, and all the "liberals" celebrate how great they are for driving essentially tax funded electric cars.

It's no surprise that companies reacted by making the most obnoxious cookie banners instead of removing the need to having those in first place (fun fact: you do NOT need those for cookies at all). Whenever you read a "We care about your privacy" that is an outright lie. If they even remotely did there would be no need to have such banners. Even for much of the more shady stuff you don't need to. And still most companies don't even adhere to the GDPR. They just have a meeting do pick some pieces and forget about it.

Democracies sadly have become a real farce. I think the world has over-optimized for it, companies have "min-maxed" for the current set of laws and now well intended laws are effectively meaningless, cause smart people came up with nice hacks to not really have to care about it. It's just like a video game, where people realize that your skill set is nice, but you can just max out DPS and bring along a tank, where you realize and realize that the debuff on your armor doesn't matter if it doesn't hit you and where the penalty on item costs is meaningless because you don't know where to put your money anyways.

And honestly, finding such strategies to optimize for "just not breaking the law" or getting around it entirely is extremely fun, compared to all the boring work at a job.

What people used to call "honest work" just doesn't work outside of very localized and small scale setting, and even there it's hard. To compare with video games again, it's like all the "soloing is possible" and yeah sure, sometimes it works, but if the big guys decide to crush you they will. So best to join up with them which is exactly what is happening.

We also see that in other laws. Monopolies are forbidden? Well either keep at least one competitor alive (iOS vs Android, AMD and Intel, etc.) or make a cartel, even a completely passive one where you just do "market analysis" to have a similar price. If your competitor raises prices, it is your job to adapt your prices to increase profits. If your competitors use cheaper materials, etc. it's the same. You never ever need to interact with your competitors.

Working together in one way or another is what made humans really productive, it works well for companies, yet somehow there is that believe that magically this won't happen and instead it's all fierce competition, which is ridiculous when the biggest threat to large successful companies is literally the market changing. So they just take safe bets and buy all the smaller largely already working products and call it innovation on their side.

It's a good, smart, reasonable strategy. But it's also very obviously not as intended.

The thing is that big surprise, it's the same for privacy protection laws. Companies don't care about your privacy at all and most people are in fact ordered to store data just to have it. They make sure it's annoying so both to make you accept them and to complain about the law. It's a real farce to think that somehow people, governments, etc. think that companies (at large) are nice and just want you, the world and everyone to be good and happy. It is baffling that people really believe that and somehow always think their favorite brand is magically different, because they met a nice lad working there in marketing.

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