4 ms·

If those companies can't remain profitable without being irresponsible with sensitive private data then maybe they shouldn't exist at all.

jstanley 11y ago
This isn't just an impediment to businesses that deal in selling "sensitive private data". It's an impediment to any business that has any data about its customers (e.g. delivery addresses). Unless I'm misunderstanding it?
- icebraining 11y ago
  Yes, it's personal data, ie., data that identifies or allows for the identification of a person.
- JupiterMoon 11y ago
  Yes this type of data is in the EU area considered as belonging to the customer not to business. The US and the various European countries have totally incompatible legal views on data protection so it should hardly be a surprise that eventually the EU is going to say that US companies have to follow the local laws.
- happyscrappy 11y ago
  Nope, more useless EU bureaucracy (stupid cookie popup) just to pretend that the NSA won't get (be given) the data by EU governments. Everyone thinks the cookie law is dumb, but there it is, constantly reminding everyone of their folly.
  - JupiterMoon 11y ago
    In terms of state level spying. I understand that currently GCHQ hands everything over to the NSA. However, I can vote and lobby in my country to have proper safeguards on how our domestic spy agencies work. I can't vote or lobby in the US to add safeguards to the NSA there. Therefore I want as a first step that my data stays in the UK. And besides this the rules for how private companies can handle my data are totally different in the UK to the US. In the UK private data comes with fairly strict obligations under the data protection acts and leaking (even accidentally or due to insufficient safeguards preventing malicious actions) can be punished robustly. As I understand it in the US the laws are rather different.
- rmc 11y ago
  Then treat personal data as radioactive. Don't store it. Don't collect it if you don't need it. If you have it, try to get rid of it, and delete it ASAP.
  - jstanley 11y ago
    That's not practical. "I haven't received my package!" "Well, we sent it 2 weeks ago" "What address did you send it to?" "Don't know" EDIT: Also, "Why does this shopping website require me to re-input the shipping address every time I want to buy something? Why can't it remember it like every website used to?"
    - Nursie 11y ago
      In general one is allowed to store data for a limited time for specific purposes. A delivery address, for instance, is vital to deliver a package to. You could probably even keep a names and addresses database so long as it was something you needed to keep in order to conduct business with the customer. Routine data mining, asking for irrelevant info, selling it on to third parties, not so much.
      - iofj 11y ago
        Maybe it's just me, but these rules are contradictory. The sentences seem explicitly designed to make that so. For instance, your email address and birthday, for, say, amazon.com, could easily be argued to "need to be kept in order to conduct business". After all, your email ... amazon spams it ... that's certainly part of the business they conduct (and frankly, they'd be more expensive if they didn't do that, so there's easy arguments that it'd be harder to do business if they didn't). Your birthday ... same. They spam you harder on your birthday ... also part of their business. Laws like this won't protect anything. The simple fact is you can't have easy to use sites like google, facebook, amazon and the many millions of easy webshops and have protection of private data, it just wouldn't work as well. Since people prove time and time again that they want the webshops and "private" chats far more than they want privacy, there is no way to win this fight. Everything is decided already (and already today kids don't have anywhere near the expectation of privacy that adults have, this will get worse), there's just a few decades of denial remaining. Take the single account (real name policy) on facebook. We all know that's the reason facebook comments don't work like youtube comments do. That's why not every second post on facebook is about hitler. That's why it's easy to find people on facebook. And so on. You can't drop it and expect the same functionality, and people have proven with their feet (/mouse) that they want the functionality more than they want multi-name policy.

jstanley 11y ago

This isn't just an impediment to businesses that deal in selling "sensitive private data". It's an impediment to any business that has any data about its customers (e.g. delivery addresses). Unless I'm misunderstanding it?

icebraining 11y ago
Yes, it's personal data, ie., data that identifies or allows for the identification of a person.
JupiterMoon 11y ago
Yes this type of data is in the EU area considered as belonging to the customer not to business. The US and the various European countries have totally incompatible legal views on data protection so it should hardly be a surprise that eventually the EU is going to say that US companies have to follow the local laws.
happyscrappy 11y ago
Nope, more useless EU bureaucracy (stupid cookie popup) just to pretend that the NSA won't get (be given) the data by EU governments. Everyone thinks the cookie law is dumb, but there it is, constantly reminding everyone of their folly.
- JupiterMoon 11y ago
  In terms of state level spying. I understand that currently GCHQ hands everything over to the NSA. However, I can vote and lobby in my country to have proper safeguards on how our domestic spy agencies work. I can't vote or lobby in the US to add safeguards to the NSA there. Therefore I want as a first step that my data stays in the UK. And besides this the rules for how private companies can handle my data are totally different in the UK to the US. In the UK private data comes with fairly strict obligations under the data protection acts and leaking (even accidentally or due to insufficient safeguards preventing malicious actions) can be punished robustly. As I understand it in the US the laws are rather different.
rmc 11y ago
Then treat personal data as radioactive. Don't store it. Don't collect it if you don't need it. If you have it, try to get rid of it, and delete it ASAP.
- jstanley 11y ago
  That's not practical. "I haven't received my package!" "Well, we sent it 2 weeks ago" "What address did you send it to?" "Don't know" EDIT: Also, "Why does this shopping website require me to re-input the shipping address every time I want to buy something? Why can't it remember it like every website used to?"
  - Nursie 11y ago
    In general one is allowed to store data for a limited time for specific purposes. A delivery address, for instance, is vital to deliver a package to. You could probably even keep a names and addresses database so long as it was something you needed to keep in order to conduct business with the customer. Routine data mining, asking for irrelevant info, selling it on to third parties, not so much.
    - iofj 11y ago
      Maybe it's just me, but these rules are contradictory. The sentences seem explicitly designed to make that so. For instance, your email address and birthday, for, say, amazon.com, could easily be argued to "need to be kept in order to conduct business". After all, your email ... amazon spams it ... that's certainly part of the business they conduct (and frankly, they'd be more expensive if they didn't do that, so there's easy arguments that it'd be harder to do business if they didn't). Your birthday ... same. They spam you harder on your birthday ... also part of their business. Laws like this won't protect anything. The simple fact is you can't have easy to use sites like google, facebook, amazon and the many millions of easy webshops and have protection of private data, it just wouldn't work as well. Since people prove time and time again that they want the webshops and "private" chats far more than they want privacy, there is no way to win this fight. Everything is decided already (and already today kids don't have anywhere near the expectation of privacy that adults have, this will get worse), there's just a few decades of denial remaining. Take the single account (real name policy) on facebook. We all know that's the reason facebook comments don't work like youtube comments do. That's why not every second post on facebook is about hitler. That's why it's easy to find people on facebook. And so on. You can't drop it and expect the same functionality, and people have proven with their feet (/mouse) that they want the functionality more than they want multi-name policy.