941–950 of 1001 posts
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I don't use browsers made by ad companies, because I fully expect that browser to stay out of the way of their revenue stream. There are many browsers out there that care about privacy.
Doesn't matter. Companies will keep tracking you in incognito mode.
Protecting users in the bargains we strike with big tech is a worthwhile and noble effort, but privacy law has generally woefully failed to do this. Millions upon millions have been spent on cookie banners -- people are still arguing about them in this thread -- but there is almost zero benefit to this expense. The main thing that's good about this, IMO, is that fundamentally training a large language model and priva…
I don't see how training an LLM has anything to do with privacy laws. It is perfectly possible to not train them on personal information, to remove or rewrite names, to remove IP addresses, etc.
Protecting users in the bargains we strike with big tech is a worthwhile and noble effort, but privacy law has generally woefully failed to do this. Millions upon millions have been spent on cookie banners -- people are still arguing about them in this thread -- but there is almost zero benefit to this expense. The main thing that's good about this, IMO, is that fundamentally training a large language model and priva…
> Training a large language model and privacy law as it's written today cannot coexist If they aren't compatible, then the conclusion is abundantly obvious; the LLM has to go, not privacy. Small and questionable economic utility in exchange for a pillar of stable democratic society are NOT negotiable tradeoff. There is enough data on the internet to train LLMs without breaking a single privacy law. If the economic va…
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You can do this trivially in modern browsers: private browsing. I have one "normal" browser window for "persistent cookie" use (like gmail, youtube, etc) and another "private" window for everything else. Cookies are lost anytime a tab closes.
Private browsing is equivalent to creating an ephemeral browser profile everytime. It might get rid of more browser storage, but for how tracking works now-a-days, it is useless. It is only for what you want to store on your disk, not for how you want to be seen to remotes.
https://coveryourtracks.eff.org
I assume a subset of these bits could be used, meaning the "unique" or not claim of this test probably doesn't reflect if you can be tracked. I also assume that a VPN would help tremendously.
For that test, as is, I get "unique" every refresh when using Brave Browser. With Safari and Chrome, I get a fail an subsequent sessions.
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> 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, wh…
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I would go farther. Privacy laws seem like an excellent way to tighten the internal European market and develop homegrown competitors, which (one might argue) Europe really needs. If Europe is loosening up those laws, does that help Europe? Or does it help Meta and Google and Microsoft?
Europe has a shitload of homegrown competitors. The problem is that users here in Europe either goes for a national service or for an US service. They don't look up what their EU neighbor has to offer. In fact, most don't bother translating their services to appeal to the entire EU market. If you live in country X, you will only ever learn about services from country X or from the US. No one here knows what goes on i…
It's really true language is a big barrier but honestly the solution cannot be for every single company to offer services in 20 languages. It can't be. English must be adopted.
I'm not understanding, as an European who's been part of multiple startups how's that supposed to boost growth. There's literally 0 startups I've been part of where data protection laws or even the infamous cookie banners have been anywhere near relevant (unless your business was literally profiling). In fact the actors that most opposed those laws have always been non Europeans. Sure, there is an attached cost in ha…
I would go farther. Privacy laws seem like an excellent way to tighten the internal European market and develop homegrown competitors, which (one might argue) Europe really needs. If Europe is loosening up those laws, does that help Europe? Or does it help Meta and Google and Microsoft?
Europe has a lot of problems that result in low ambition and growth, privacy law isn't one of them.
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Most criticism of GDPR on HN is a criticism of bad-faith attempts to pretend to comply, many of which are expressly forbidden by the GDPR. It's a well-written, plain English regulation, and I encourage everyone to read it before criticising it. (At the very least, point to the bits of the regulation you disagree with: it should only take around 5 minutes to look up.)
Hear hear. My company had consultants come in to help with GDPR, I left after months of them being hired: more confused than I went in. So I went to the source, and I found it surprisingly easy to read and quite clear. I think theres a lot of bad faith discussion about the GDPR being complex by people who have a financial interest in people disliking it (or, parroting what someone else said). Heres the full text: htt…
Normally one tries to hire lawyers that have read the law and formed an opinion already…
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 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…
You have the immense power of denying them access to your money, which turns out is a very compelling argument :)