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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

#741

Post by mattlutze »

energy123 wrote: post #304
rckt wrote: post #270

I get that too many regulations is a bad thing. But when we talk privacy and personal data there should be no gray zone. It has to be black and white. When I see a stupid cookie banner I search for "Reject all". There's no some data that companies can collect and process without my consent, they just shouldn't be able to collect anything without me actively opting in. Business never respects anything, but profits. Se…

I've stopped thinking of regulations as a single dial, where more regulations is bad or less regulations is bad. It entirely depends on what is being regulated and how. Some areas need more regulations, some areas need less. Some areas need altered regulation. Some areas have just the right regulations. Most regulations can be improved, some more than others.

When we let the market bubble-up protective conditions through buyer behavior, we advantage innovation at the cost of accepting more harms, because the market response is always reactive instead of proactive, and the reaction can sometimes take decades or more (like GHG emissions and global warming).

When we let structural regulations assert protective conditions on a market, we try to advantage proactive harm reduction at the cost of innovation, because artificial market limitations will be barriers to innovation and create secondary game conditions that advantage some players.

Which way we lean should depend on the type and severity of potential harms, especially with consideration of how permanent or non-reversible those harms are.

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#742

Post by zelphirkalt »

palata wrote: post #727
zelphirkalt wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why we need to realize, that decisions in the small constitute what happens in the large. If some person comes and tells me to implement dark patterns into the consent popup, I'll tell them that this is illegal. I'll also tell people, when their current consent is manufactured or when their cookie/consent popup does not conform with GDPR. Been there, done that. Only unfortunate, that it was not my role to deal…

I have been in that situation in a startup. The boss would come to me and ask for some dark pattern (not cookies, I don't remember exactly what it was). I said I wouldn't do it. They literally asked a guy in the adjacent room, and he took it as a new task and did it. He was not a bad guy: I did not care about getting fired (I was young and single), he did (he had a family). And in his opinion, if the boss wanted it,…

Both understandable and good that you stood up to it!

Sometimes though bosses need some contradiction, for the business to be successful. It is not the best approach to have no opinions or ethics.

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#743

Post by rckt »

nmz wrote: post #536
rckt wrote: post #270

I get that too many regulations is a bad thing. But when we talk privacy and personal data there should be no gray zone. It has to be black and white. When I see a stupid cookie banner I search for "Reject all". There's no some data that companies can collect and process without my consent, they just shouldn't be able to collect anything without me actively opting in. Business never respects anything, but profits. Se…

Why not accept and let cookie autodelete delete it after closing the site? Expecting any industry to follow the law is foolish, if it gets big enough, they will wear down and overturn any annoyance against it, malicious compliance is the only way. https://adnauseam.io/

I think we better remove the problem itself that come up with more and more ways to mitigate it.

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#744

Post by Ylpertnodi »

bl0rg wrote: post #709
VadimPR wrote: post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Sweden and Netherlands it is quite easy and straightforward to register a business, speaking from personal experience. Tax filing is quite straightforward as well, especially for personal income tax.

Starting a company in Sweden requires (uploaded PDF from Bolagsverket to ChatGPT who summarized): 1. Prepare the foundation deed and the articles of association. 2. Identify the beneficial owner(s). 3. Pay the share capital and obtain the bank certificate or auditor’s statement. 4. Submit the registration application for the limited company to the Swedish Companies Registration Office (Bolagsverket) and wait for appr…

> This is not what I'd call a straightforward process, personally.

It's a (check)list....what could be more straightforward?

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#745

Post by miki123211 »

wqaatwt wrote: post #655
bjourne wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is the perfect and correct antidote to any slippery slope argument. If the consequences of the law turns out to be as bad as you say they will be then we adjust the law.

> they will be then we adjust the law. Bizarrely horrible approach. A lot of damage would already be done, most importantly changing the status quo is inherently much harder than doing nothing. So going back won’t necessarily be straightforward. Claiming that “slippery slope” is always a fallacy is a gross misconception and misinterpretation. It varies case by case, very often it can be a perfectly rational argument.…

> Bizarrely horrible approach

I very heavily disagree here, we aren't doing as much of this as we should be.

Society is too complex of a system to predict what consequences a law will have. Badly written laws slip through. Loopholes are discovered after the fact. Incentives do what incentives do, and people eventually figure out how to game them to their own benefit. First order effects cause second order effects, which cause third order effects. Technology changes. We can't predict all of that in advance.

Trying to write a perfect law is like trying to write a perfect program on your first try, with no testing and verification, just reasoning about it in a notebook. If the code or law is of any complexity, it just can't be done. Programmers have figured this out and came up with ways to mitigate the problem, from unit testing and formal verification to canaries, feature flags, blue-green deployments and slow rollouts. Lawmakers could learn those same lessons (and use very similar strategies), but that is very rarely done.

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#746

Post by rckt »

mvdtnz wrote: post #449
rckt wrote: post #270

I get that too many regulations is a bad thing. But when we talk privacy and personal data there should be no gray zone. It has to be black and white. When I see a stupid cookie banner I search for "Reject all". There's no some data that companies can collect and process without my consent, they just shouldn't be able to collect anything without me actively opting in. Business never respects anything, but profits. Se…

There are lots of uses for cookies that have absolutely nothing to do with collecting data about you.

That's true. But it's just a small part of overall tracking. And nobody would care if the cookies were used only for auth or purely functional reasons.

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#747

Post by [deleted] »

energy123 wrote: post #304
rckt wrote: post #270

I get that too many regulations is a bad thing. But when we talk privacy and personal data there should be no gray zone. It has to be black and white. When I see a stupid cookie banner I search for "Reject all". There's no some data that companies can collect and process without my consent, they just shouldn't be able to collect anything without me actively opting in. Business never respects anything, but profits. Se…

I've stopped thinking of regulations as a single dial, where more regulations is bad or less regulations is bad. It entirely depends on what is being regulated and how. Some areas need more regulations, some areas need less. Some areas need altered regulation. Some areas have just the right regulations. Most regulations can be improved, some more than others.

[deleted]

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#748

Post by matheusmoreira »

radicalbyte wrote: post #35
bitpush wrote: 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…

There has been a change in the community here over the last decade, we've lost a lot of the hacker spirit and have a larger proportion of "chancers", people who are only in tech to "get rich quick". The legacy of ZIRP combined with The Social Network marketing.

The "hacker spirit" is dying.

Corporations and governments are locking computers down. Secure boot. Hardware remote attestation. Think you can have control by installing your own software? Your device is now banned from everything. We eill be ostracized from digital society. Marginalized. Reduced to second class citizens, if that.

Everything the word "hacker" ever stood for is being destroyed. I predict one day we'll need licenses to program computers.

It's gotten to the point sacrificing ideals for money has started to make sense for me. The future is too bleak. Might as well try to get rich.

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#749

Post by tim333 »

Telaneo wrote: post #344
omnimus wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say it's a lot more than 500%. If your business is based on doing things that are illegal under GDPR then the cost of doing that startup is close to infinite. But that's kinda the point of GDPR.

This. Sure, it's X% more difficult to do Y in Europe, because Europe doesn't want you to do Y, either at all, or unless you clean up after yourself so the costs aren't just eaten up by the environment or whatever, or unless you do it without causing harm. That's not a problem. That's the system working as intended. Sure, Europe doesn't have it's own Microsoft, probably because of regulations like this, but I don't wa…

Europe having its own Microsoft might be better than Europe having to use the US one and sending it like $100/user/yr in whatever subscription they've tricked them into.

Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

#750

Post by aniviacat »

SamDc73 wrote: post #622
bitpush wrote: 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…

> What I really want to see is Meta getting irrelevant ON MERIT. People stop using Meta products, and then I want to see it die. But not by forcing the hand - that's bad for everyone, especially the enterpreuer / hacker types on this site I honestly don’t get why so many people jump to the whole "we need the government to save us or we’re doomed" argument. To me, it's simple: put your money where your mouth is. I can…

To many (especially younger) people, giving up Meta products would make them a social outcast.

Some industries naturally tend torwards monopolies. In social networks, this effect is very strong.

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