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…
> But when we talk privacy and personal data there should be no gray zone. It took me to move to Germany to figure that privacy is a spectrum, and I, despite being a crazy on privacy and security, actually don't want that much. I've been to a German factory where robots could not distinct between humans and objects bc Datenschutz. My colleagues had 3 bikes stolen in a week bc we have no CCTV cameras. Privacy definite…
Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws
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Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws
#812I 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…
Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws
#813Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The amount of time and money we've spent just making sure we are in compliance is quite high, and we barely operate in Europe and don't collect PII. So either you're lying or your lawyers are lying to you. In 9 years you could've finally read and understood the rather small law yourself.
I have read and believe I understand it. That does not matter. What matters is can your decisions be defended in front of a judge. I am not qualified to figure that out, and unless you're a lawyer, neither are you.
It's not a lawyer's job to answer that question because the answer is necessarily "yes" unless you intentionally did the illegal thing (i.e. intentionally did what the law explicitly tells you not to do) - and even then you might be able to defend it somehow.
The question is whether you have a good enough case for a ruling in your favor. And again, lawyers can't answer that because the question is always "it depends" - they're not in the business of fortune telling.
If you ask a lawyer for legal advice, it's their job to give you sufficiently good and accurate enough advice that if you tried to sue them over giving you bad or inaccurate advice they'd have a good enough chance of winning that lawsuit. How much they're willing to speculate about things like what's good enough for you and how high they'll set the bar depends on a variety of factors again.
There's literally no guarantee you can successfully defend something in front of a judge. The law is the law and the facts are the facts. If you end up in court, it helps if you have solid paperwork and a solid papertrail you can use to demonstrate you did everything correctly and in good faith - this is about creating facts that can be used to your advantage.
But the amount of expense required to do literally everything perfectly to the letter of the law and reliably document that you did so would make running a profitable operation impossible regardless of what laws we're talking about, so you necessarily have to strike a balance. And where you strike that balance is a business decision because it's about managing the risk of doing business. And that's not something your lawyer can decide for you - that's something you have to decide for yourself if you run the business. Because at the end of the day it's about your personal liability - whether through financial risk if your business is held liable or direct liability if you get personally held liable for your actions.
But this is not legal advice, I'm not a lawyer. I just know enough about (EU privacy and general German) law to be dangerous and accidentally trick actual lawyers into thinking I have a law degree.
By the way, that's also where that line comes from: it's saying "you can't hold me liable for decisions you make based on what I told you" - even when what a lawyer says is perfectly reasonable and sound to them they'll likely tell you it's "not legal advice" unless you are willing to pay the price tag of being able to hold them liable for what they said.
Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws
#814I 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…
> But when we talk privacy and personal data there should be no gray zone. It took me to move to Germany to figure that privacy is a spectrum, and I, despite being a crazy on privacy and security, actually don't want that much. I've been to a German factory where robots could not distinct between humans and objects bc Datenschutz. My colleagues had 3 bikes stolen in a week bc we have no CCTV cameras. Privacy definite…
It sounds interesting but I'm not sure what it means. Could you clarify this?
Related, recently in the UK news. British Transport Police won't even look at CCTV for bike theft at train stations (because of resource constraints, but the presence of CCTV doesn't automatically mean it will be used).
Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws
#815I love how you can think about any of these ideas in a really basic way like a 5 year old and you'll know intuitively that it'll all fail, particularly if you invert it: for example: - bureaucracy creates less bureaucracy - price controls create more supply - adding more rules creates more freedom - government is good at understanding technology - the more people you have the better your decisions will be - the furth…
Generally agree, except for point three. - adding more rules creates more freedom. Imagine the US without a constitution. It’d be madness. In a lawless country, people would be less free to do things they actually want to do because they’re so occupied with just surviving.
Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws
#816I sympathize with the startup argument: heavy compliance costs can stifle early innovation. But the solution shouldn’t be “weaker rules.” It should be smarter rules, clearer safe harbors for small actors, browser-level consent primitives for users, and stronger enforcement against dark-pattern CMPs. That keeps privacy meaningful without killing small businesses.
But it's really hard to tinker as a single hacker when a German legal troll firm can come for you for linking Google fonts on your web page (i.e. transferring IPs so breaching privacy)
Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws
#817I 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 is an infinitely more effective and trustworthy solution: an adblocker that blocks trackers. You don't have to spend minutes daily on dark-pattern banners. You don't risk the broken implementations that still track you no matter what you click, that regulators can't oversee on billions of websites. They should just keep the thing that lets you request full deletion of your account and data, the rest is total se…
try untangling the tracking code from the rest of the javascript code which is required for the sites to work - simply unrealistic.
Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws
#818Incredible 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…
Me too. But losing on merit requires an (at least somewhat) fair marketplace.
Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws
#819Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But when we talk privacy and personal data there should be no gray zone. It took me to move to Germany to figure that privacy is a spectrum, and I, despite being a crazy on privacy and security, actually don't want that much. I've been to a German factory where robots could not distinct between humans and objects bc Datenschutz. My colleagues had 3 bikes stolen in a week bc we have no CCTV cameras. Privacy definite…
I'm curious how the CCTV would have prevented the bike theft?
Re: Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws
#820Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But when we talk privacy and personal data there should be no gray zone. It took me to move to Germany to figure that privacy is a spectrum, and I, despite being a crazy on privacy and security, actually don't want that much. I've been to a German factory where robots could not distinct between humans and objects bc Datenschutz. My colleagues had 3 bikes stolen in a week bc we have no CCTV cameras. Privacy definite…
I'm curious how the CCTV would have prevented the bike theft?
You may have your laptop snatched, go to the police station and show them the exact location of the thieves using e.g. find my Mac. The will do nothing, even if it's in the building across the street.
Now, showing them some blurry (at best) faces in CCTV footage and ask them to investigate? Good luck.