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a conscientious startup ... can have a boilerplate response ready to go in those cases I have businesses that don't do anything shady at all with personal data

a conscientious startup ... can have a boilerplate response ready to go in those cases I have businesses that don't do anything shady at all with personal data, and I'd like to think we're conscientious about handling what we do have. We follow general good practice in terms of encryption, hashing passwords, and so on. We've never had any sort of request for information under existing data protection rules, nor complaints under any other regulatory regime for that matter. So, how much time and money should we spend putting together that boilerplate, just to tick a legal box? How much of the documentation formally required under the GDPR should we actually write, given that on the evidence of several years of trading so far it has literally no value to anyone? How much should we spend on things like getting lawyers to review the contracts we have with the small number of outside services we do use, which might have access to some personal data in connection with the services they provide for us, and how often? If you actually follow the letter of the law here, the costs of compliance would be astronomical by small business standards. There is little proportionately built into the GDPR itself, so we are reliant on regulators to introduce it, and that's not a good position to be in either legally or practically.

gingerlime 9y ago
That's what bothers me the most about the GDPR. There's total lack of proportionality. Here's how the potential fines are defined: Under GDPR organizations in breach of GDPR can be fined up to 4% of annual global turnover or €20 Million (whichever is greater). whichever is greater... So since my company's turnover is order of magnitude less than €20 Million, I guess this means we can get totally buried??
- icebraining 9y ago
  Yes, so what? Did you know that as an individual, you can literally be imprisoned for decades for violating the law? Why is it so shocking that a company that violates the law can be forced into bankruptcy? The key term there, of course, is "up to". You don't get fined the maximum amount for the smallest violation. It's a range, depending on the severity of the violation, and probably whether there was gross negligence and/or maliciousness.
  - kodablah 9y ago
    There are sentence maximums for different crimes for a reason, and often people are unjustly sentenced to the maximum level. With your analogy we should just have the option to sentence everyone to life for any transgression and then just tell everyone "but they won't". I don't understand why this is constantly handwaved away with statements that claim to tell the future. If you are correct that the violations aren't as large in some cases, that can codify it a bit better than "trust us".
    - icebraining 9y ago
      What makes you say they aren't codified better than that?
    - lagadu 9y ago
      To reverse your argument: without data protection laws we're just trusting corporations that they won't commit any transgression. Your "worst case" description is exactly the current scenario that we have in place being practiced by corporations who have your private data: all you have from them is "trust us".
- kodablah 9y ago
  Depends on who you ask. Those who trust government will tell you that you can count on the subjective enforcement not to go after you as much, and of course the good ol "don't break the law and you have nothing to worry about". The rest of us that understand government incompetence/corruption and risk mitigation would tell you that you have to weigh whether these risks are real enough to you. I would tell a non-growth-focused early stage company uninterested in locale variety with limited resources (e.g. bootstrapped company in beta) to avoid EU customers since there are only downsides.
  - dangrossman 9y ago
    > avoid EU customers If anyone from the EU visits your website, and you're collecting server logs or analytics with IP addresses in them, you're now processing personal data of EU citizens and subject to the GDPR. They've written this regulation such that pretty much everything on the internet is subject to it.
    - kodablah 9y ago
      Well geo IP blocks are much easier than fetching those logs by user on request. This will happen if EU citizens overly burden companies with these letters... but not until then probably. I definitely wouldn't want to jeopardize my future EU prospects by ignoring the requests for info. It may be a bit of an unlikely scenario, but people should remember their opinions on region-specific content blocking even if they think their region has enough leverage to make everyone bend to their will.
      - xg15 9y ago
        If I don't need an adblocker because all the adtech companies already preemptively block me, I personally could live with that and would consider the GDPR to be working as intended.
        minaguib 9y ago
        It doesn't have to come to this, at least from adtech's side. Generally, your device is instructed via a publisher's site/app to reach out to ad tech servers either directly (firstparty), or indirectly (firstparty->thirdparty, firstparty->RTB exchange->thirdparty). Due to the "chaining", GDPR is particularly onerous on the adtech industry. Granted all the data is keyed by semi-anonymous IDs (cookies, IDFAs, IPs), the concerns for consent, retrievals, deletions, in a cascading manner, are an industry-wide problem requiring collective action. The IAB proposed something for the RTB side, the publishers don't like it, and it'll be tense until and through May 25th :) Having said that, nobody wants to shut-the-whole-thing-down. While all these servers may refuse service based on fuzzing the request as originating from the EU, they may also decide to serve as-best-as-possible and minimize logging of the sensitive fields - it may be better, for example, to lose some functionality for European devices (behavioural targeting, for example, the idea of showing you an ad for the Widget you just looked at over and over), than to serve nothing at all.
- DanBC 9y ago
  If you look at enforcement under current regime in eg UK the ICO has never used their maximum fine. If this is carrot and stick the stick is fucking tiny and hardly ever used.
DanBC 9y ago
If you can't already answer these questions you're probably already breaking EU law. There's been a round of companies "reconfiming" email lists "because GDPR" - but if those companies can't show clear opt-in before sending email they're already in breach of PECR.
SllX 9y ago
How much personal info that you have, do you actually need? I don't know your business, and I don't particularly want to, but this is a good opportunity to review how much of the data you retain you even should be retaining. If the amount is anything substantial, more than contact information and whatever data customers might choose to be hosting with you, then you are exactly the right target for GDPR and you should be spending whatever amount you deem necessary to avoid the fines. It's harsh, but it is true that software and service companies in general, maybe not you, maybe not your company, are far too lax with personal info, and so now legislative bodies like the EU are choosing to address that issue, and the easiest way to be in compliance is to not have anymore customer data than you actually need so when you do get hit with a letter like the one linked here, you have a much easier time responding. Will this strangle some businesses? Even prevent some from even getting started? Undoubtedly, but that is a trade-off I'm willing to accept in this world where every incentive is stacked against the integrity of my privacy.
- Silhouette 9y ago
  Well, speaking just for my own businesses, we've always minimised how much personal data we use, and all the processing we do is for good reasons that are directly related to what we're offering as a service. This wasn't due to any legal obligations, just basic good practice in terms of security and what I consider an ethical stance regarding the privacy of our customers. I suppose this is why I'm so frustrated by this whole issue. I have a lot of sympathy for your argument that some businesses exploit personal data in ways we might well agree are abusive, and that something needed to be done to curb that. But as someone who does try to do the right thing both ethically and legally, this is just another set of regulations that is going to cause compliance overheads for my own businesses while offering little if any real benefit to anyone in our case. Meanwhile, if the risk of significant enforcement action against smaller businesses really is low, the door is open for competitors to take their chances and gain an advantage over us, particularly if they're not in the EU themselves. So it also seems to be a case of no good deed going unpunished.
  - SllX 9y ago
    I'm sympathetic if your practices are already good, but the balance of power between an individual and a corporation is too far on the side of corporations as things stand. This levels things out for individuals who otherwise have to depend entirely on the goodwill of corporations. That includes you, the individual as well, and I hope it works out for you the corporation.

gingerlime 9y ago

That's what bothers me the most about the GDPR. There's total lack of proportionality. Here's how the potential fines are defined: Under GDPR organizations in breach of GDPR can be fined up to 4% of annual global turnover or €20 Million (whichever is greater). whichever is greater... So since my company's turnover is order of magnitude less than €20 Million, I guess this means we can get totally buried??

icebraining 9y ago
Yes, so what? Did you know that as an individual, you can literally be imprisoned for decades for violating the law? Why is it so shocking that a company that violates the law can be forced into bankruptcy? The key term there, of course, is "up to". You don't get fined the maximum amount for the smallest violation. It's a range, depending on the severity of the violation, and probably whether there was gross negligence and/or maliciousness.
- kodablah 9y ago
  There are sentence maximums for different crimes for a reason, and often people are unjustly sentenced to the maximum level. With your analogy we should just have the option to sentence everyone to life for any transgression and then just tell everyone "but they won't". I don't understand why this is constantly handwaved away with statements that claim to tell the future. If you are correct that the violations aren't as large in some cases, that can codify it a bit better than "trust us".
  - icebraining 9y ago
    What makes you say they aren't codified better than that?
  - lagadu 9y ago
    To reverse your argument: without data protection laws we're just trusting corporations that they won't commit any transgression. Your "worst case" description is exactly the current scenario that we have in place being practiced by corporations who have your private data: all you have from them is "trust us".
kodablah 9y ago
Depends on who you ask. Those who trust government will tell you that you can count on the subjective enforcement not to go after you as much, and of course the good ol "don't break the law and you have nothing to worry about". The rest of us that understand government incompetence/corruption and risk mitigation would tell you that you have to weigh whether these risks are real enough to you. I would tell a non-growth-focused early stage company uninterested in locale variety with limited resources (e.g. bootstrapped company in beta) to avoid EU customers since there are only downsides.
- dangrossman 9y ago
  > avoid EU customers If anyone from the EU visits your website, and you're collecting server logs or analytics with IP addresses in them, you're now processing personal data of EU citizens and subject to the GDPR. They've written this regulation such that pretty much everything on the internet is subject to it.
  - kodablah 9y ago
    Well geo IP blocks are much easier than fetching those logs by user on request. This will happen if EU citizens overly burden companies with these letters... but not until then probably. I definitely wouldn't want to jeopardize my future EU prospects by ignoring the requests for info. It may be a bit of an unlikely scenario, but people should remember their opinions on region-specific content blocking even if they think their region has enough leverage to make everyone bend to their will.
    - xg15 9y ago
      If I don't need an adblocker because all the adtech companies already preemptively block me, I personally could live with that and would consider the GDPR to be working as intended.
      - minaguib 9y ago
        It doesn't have to come to this, at least from adtech's side. Generally, your device is instructed via a publisher's site/app to reach out to ad tech servers either directly (firstparty), or indirectly (firstparty->thirdparty, firstparty->RTB exchange->thirdparty). Due to the "chaining", GDPR is particularly onerous on the adtech industry. Granted all the data is keyed by semi-anonymous IDs (cookies, IDFAs, IPs), the concerns for consent, retrievals, deletions, in a cascading manner, are an industry-wide problem requiring collective action. The IAB proposed something for the RTB side, the publishers don't like it, and it'll be tense until and through May 25th :) Having said that, nobody wants to shut-the-whole-thing-down. While all these servers may refuse service based on fuzzing the request as originating from the EU, they may also decide to serve as-best-as-possible and minimize logging of the sensitive fields - it may be better, for example, to lose some functionality for European devices (behavioural targeting, for example, the idea of showing you an ad for the Widget you just looked at over and over), than to serve nothing at all.
DanBC 9y ago
If you look at enforcement under current regime in eg UK the ICO has never used their maximum fine. If this is carrot and stick the stick is fucking tiny and hardly ever used.

DanBC 9y ago

If you can't already answer these questions you're probably already breaking EU law. There's been a round of companies "reconfiming" email lists "because GDPR" - but if those companies can't show clear opt-in before sending email they're already in breach of PECR.

SllX 9y ago

How much personal info that you have, do you actually need? I don't know your business, and I don't particularly want to, but this is a good opportunity to review how much of the data you retain you even should be retaining. If the amount is anything substantial, more than contact information and whatever data customers might choose to be hosting with you, then you are exactly the right target for GDPR and you should be spending whatever amount you deem necessary to avoid the fines. It's harsh, but it is true that software and service companies in general, maybe not you, maybe not your company, are far too lax with personal info, and so now legislative bodies like the EU are choosing to address that issue, and the easiest way to be in compliance is to not have anymore customer data than you actually need so when you do get hit with a letter like the one linked here, you have a much easier time responding. Will this strangle some businesses? Even prevent some from even getting started? Undoubtedly, but that is a trade-off I'm willing to accept in this world where every incentive is stacked against the integrity of my privacy.

Silhouette 9y ago
Well, speaking just for my own businesses, we've always minimised how much personal data we use, and all the processing we do is for good reasons that are directly related to what we're offering as a service. This wasn't due to any legal obligations, just basic good practice in terms of security and what I consider an ethical stance regarding the privacy of our customers. I suppose this is why I'm so frustrated by this whole issue. I have a lot of sympathy for your argument that some businesses exploit personal data in ways we might well agree are abusive, and that something needed to be done to curb that. But as someone who does try to do the right thing both ethically and legally, this is just another set of regulations that is going to cause compliance overheads for my own businesses while offering little if any real benefit to anyone in our case. Meanwhile, if the risk of significant enforcement action against smaller businesses really is low, the door is open for competitors to take their chances and gain an advantage over us, particularly if they're not in the EU themselves. So it also seems to be a case of no good deed going unpunished.
- SllX 9y ago
  I'm sympathetic if your practices are already good, but the balance of power between an individual and a corporation is too far on the side of corporations as things stand. This levels things out for individuals who otherwise have to depend entirely on the goodwill of corporations. That includes you, the individual as well, and I hope it works out for you the corporation.