8 ms·

>We sleep-walked into a society where the expectation is that any and all data is scooped up and sent off remotely without adequate controls We used to live in

>We sleep-walked into a society where the expectation is that any and all data is scooped up and sent off remotely without adequate controls We used to live in a society where webmasters' rights to the fruits of their labor weren't trampled on by inane regulation (to this degree at least). Now if you run a website in the EU, any user who signs up to it has control over the contents of your servers and you have to ask in extremely specific detail to do anything with some of that content, and that "consent" can be revoked at any time. The EU has shot themselves in the foot and more and more companies are going to refuse to do business with them because of it.

BinaryIdiot 8y ago
> We used to live in a society where webmasters' rights to the fruits of their labor weren't trampled on by inane regulation (to this degree at least) So someone having a copy of my data that I wish be removed is trampling on a webmaster's rights? That makes no sense whatsoever. > Now if you run a website in the EU, any user who signs up to it has control over the contents of your servers This isn't even true. They have _a tiny bit more_ control of what you can do _with their_ data. That's it. Buckle up because this type of regulation is only going to happen more frequently and in large part because of your attitude that it is "your" data versus the user's data.
- jimmaswell 8y ago
  But it's not "their" data. It's the webmaster's data. It rightfully belongs to the webmaster. It just happens to pertain to the user. There is no justification for that information still belonging to the user after the user surrenders it to the website.
  - anonymouz 8y ago
    > But it's not "their" data. It's the webmaster's data. No > It rightfully belongs to the webmaster. No, you are completely wrong here. The basic point of the legislation (and other privacy legislation in the EU that came before GDPR) is that a users personal data absolutely does not belong to the someone else once collected.
    - jimmaswell 8y ago
      I obviously wasn't talking in a legal sense, I was talking in a "what's actually right and good" sense. The law doesn't make something right. Rightfully, the information belongs to the webmaster. Under GDPR, users get to put a leash and muzzle on webmasters.
      - anonymouz 8y ago
        Well, I'd say it's also not at all rightful in a "what's actually right and good" sense. And as others have pointed out, no the users don't get to put a leash on webmasters, it just allows the users to retain some degree of control over what the webmasters are allowed to do with personal information about their users. But feel free to argue that it is your moral right to sell user's e-mail addresses to some spammer or whatever.
        jimmaswell 8y ago
        "users don't get to put a leash on webmasters, it just allows the users to retain some degree of control over what the webmasters are allowed to do" I'll let that excerpt speak for itself. And yes, I'm arguing it's anyone's moral right to profit off information voluntarily entered into their website unless a specific agreement was made on the website to the contrary.
        GordonS 8y ago
        > And yes, I'm arguing it's anyone's moral right to profit off information voluntarily entered into their website unless a specific agreement was made on the website to the contrary Views like this are exactly why we need the GDPR. I find it utterly ridiculous - disgusting even - that you really believe you have the right to do whatever you want with someone else's personal information. When you provide an email address, physical address, name or other PI, it's with the expectation of it being used for a specific purpose - you should absolutely not give you the right to sell that information to the highest bidder.
  - rocqua 8y ago
    If I get nude picutures of you, or your mother, daughter etc. is it then "my data"? Am I therefore allowed to do with that data as I wish? I think most people agree that unless those pictures are gathered with very specific consent, subject to many restrictions, they are not "my data". This is obviously an extreme example, but the reasoning extends to more data that is considered sensitive. The point being that "data ownership" is a complicated issue.
    - wilsonnb 8y ago
      Well whoever took the picture is the one that holds the copyright usually so it's more or less that person's data. Pictures probably aren't a good example because they are covered by intellectual property laws.
      - slrz 8y ago
        Then let's move on to credit card details. You gave them to me for payment purposes in the course of doing normal business. Months later, I discover that I can sell my stock of credit card information on the darknet for some nice extra income. Should I be allowed to do that? What if it weren't credit card details but just postal addresses?
        jimmaswell 8y ago
        The credit card example was already illegal by other, more targeted legislation. Nobody likes getting a lot of junk mail, but it's not the end of the world. I actually got my first credit card from a pre-approved offer found in junk mail.
        wilsonnb 8y ago
        Yes, you should be able to do that, unless you are reasonably certain that the information might be used to commit credit card fraud/identity theft. If you think they might be used illegally, I believe there are already laws to charge you with that relate to facilitating a crime. If you don't think they will be used illegally, then what's the harm in selling them to someone else?
hobofan 8y ago
As it seems that we are making society-wide sweeping statements here, I'll add mine: In a society where the webmasters have shown that they can't uphold their duty to secure PII (or any kind of data really), as evidenced by ~monthly high-profile data leaks, they deserve to be restricted in their "rights to the fruits of their labor".
elephant0xffff 8y ago
> [...] Now if you run a website in the EU, any user who signs up to it has control over the contents of your servers and you have to ask in extremely specific detail to do anything with some of that content, and that "consent" can be revoked at any time. You are saying that's a bad thing? Services that require you to sign up, should provide the possibility for users to look at, modify and delete their user data - that's all. Where's the problem?
- jimmaswell 8y ago
  Yes, I'm saying that's a bad thing. Someone shouldn't have a right to come into my house and tear up a piece of paper in my drawer if I happened to write something about them on it. The problem is that there's no justification for having the right to coerce other people just because they have information you gave them. If users enter names into your website, you're not allowed to run a statistical analysis of what names are most common on your website without asking. If people named Jane are more likely to eat ice cream, you can't target ice cream ads at them and help keep your site free, without asking them. Worse than just this kind of coercion of what you're not allowed to do, users can coerce you into taking time out of your day to expunge records about them. It's all entirely backwards.
  - elephant0xffff 8y ago
    > If people named Jane are more likely to eat ice cream, you can't target ice cream ads at them and help keep your site free, without asking them. Apart from the fact that people named Jane aren't more likely to eat ice cream, you seem to criticize that it gets harder to target ads? Oh no, that's a real pity. Oh no, poor webmasters.
    - jimmaswell 8y ago
      >Oh no, that's a real pity. Oh no, poor webmasters. Why are the rights of people who own websites less important to you than the rights of other people? Regardless, you might not still be saying this once half the websites smaller than Google become subscription-based in the EU or just block the EU altogether.
DanBC 8y ago
Why do you think consent is required?
oaiey 8y ago
I find your view very interesting. You have a very capitalist and US law based perspective on it. For one, not everything in a society needs to allow to "collect the fruits" of individual work (which is essentially capitalism). Europe has much more socialism mixed into their understanding of their societies than the US. Further, the US law is based on risks of heavy punishments but few regulations, while the law in many parts of Europe is based on strict regulations but less high fines. It looks like the EU has too many rules, but that is a subject of perspective. Problem here: The internet gives a shit about borders and society.
- lovich 8y ago
  Please don't just say this is a US perspective. This is a sociopaths perspective that the current US legal system promotes due to the machinations of the same group of sociopaths. Every business owner here who would complain about how the GPDR is taking their rights to their personally earned data away would be the same people who launch a lawsuit because one of their competitior's products had a typeface that was vaguely similar to theirs There are regular people here, they just don't go starting businesses that have abusing their customers as a business model because they couldn't sleep at night if they did that
  - jimmaswell 8y ago
    Targeted ads hardly qualify as abuse to me. Getting to use a website for free in exchange for your browsing data being analyzed is a great deal and a win/win for everybody. Surely anyone who disagrees with your feelings on this matter must be a sociopath, though.
    - s73v3r_ 8y ago
      "Getting to use a website for free in exchange for your browsing data being analyzed is a great deal and a win/win for everybody." Which is why you are perfectly capable of giving consent to other websites to do that. "Surely anyone who disagrees with your feelings on this matter must be a sociopath, though." No, just those who insist on a "take it or leave it" approach.
s73v3r_ 8y ago
"We used to live in a society where webmasters' rights to the fruits of their labor weren't trampled on by inane regulation" We still do. Nothing has changed on that front. "Now if you run a website in the EU, any user who signs up to it has control over the contents of your servers and you have to ask in extremely specific detail to do anything with some of that content, and that "consent" can be revoked at any time." As it should have been from the beginning. Having the standard being that the company hoovers up all your data all the time without telling you what they're doing with it or why they need it was a terrible, terrible thing. "The EU has shot themselves in the foot and more and more companies are going to refuse to do business with them because of it." I highly doubt it.

BinaryIdiot 8y ago

> We used to live in a society where webmasters' rights to the fruits of their labor weren't trampled on by inane regulation (to this degree at least) So someone having a copy of my data that I wish be removed is trampling on a webmaster's rights? That makes no sense whatsoever. > Now if you run a website in the EU, any user who signs up to it has control over the contents of your servers This isn't even true. They have _a tiny bit more_ control of what you can do _with their_ data. That's it. Buckle up because this type of regulation is only going to happen more frequently and in large part because of your attitude that it is "your" data versus the user's data.

jimmaswell 8y ago
But it's not "their" data. It's the webmaster's data. It rightfully belongs to the webmaster. It just happens to pertain to the user. There is no justification for that information still belonging to the user after the user surrenders it to the website.
- anonymouz 8y ago
  > But it's not "their" data. It's the webmaster's data. No > It rightfully belongs to the webmaster. No, you are completely wrong here. The basic point of the legislation (and other privacy legislation in the EU that came before GDPR) is that a users personal data absolutely does not belong to the someone else once collected.
  - jimmaswell 8y ago
    I obviously wasn't talking in a legal sense, I was talking in a "what's actually right and good" sense. The law doesn't make something right. Rightfully, the information belongs to the webmaster. Under GDPR, users get to put a leash and muzzle on webmasters.
    - anonymouz 8y ago
      Well, I'd say it's also not at all rightful in a "what's actually right and good" sense. And as others have pointed out, no the users don't get to put a leash on webmasters, it just allows the users to retain some degree of control over what the webmasters are allowed to do with personal information about their users. But feel free to argue that it is your moral right to sell user's e-mail addresses to some spammer or whatever.
      - jimmaswell 8y ago
        "users don't get to put a leash on webmasters, it just allows the users to retain some degree of control over what the webmasters are allowed to do" I'll let that excerpt speak for itself. And yes, I'm arguing it's anyone's moral right to profit off information voluntarily entered into their website unless a specific agreement was made on the website to the contrary.
        GordonS 8y ago
        > And yes, I'm arguing it's anyone's moral right to profit off information voluntarily entered into their website unless a specific agreement was made on the website to the contrary Views like this are exactly why we need the GDPR. I find it utterly ridiculous - disgusting even - that you really believe you have the right to do whatever you want with someone else's personal information. When you provide an email address, physical address, name or other PI, it's with the expectation of it being used for a specific purpose - you should absolutely not give you the right to sell that information to the highest bidder.
- rocqua 8y ago
  If I get nude picutures of you, or your mother, daughter etc. is it then "my data"? Am I therefore allowed to do with that data as I wish? I think most people agree that unless those pictures are gathered with very specific consent, subject to many restrictions, they are not "my data". This is obviously an extreme example, but the reasoning extends to more data that is considered sensitive. The point being that "data ownership" is a complicated issue.
  - wilsonnb 8y ago
    Well whoever took the picture is the one that holds the copyright usually so it's more or less that person's data. Pictures probably aren't a good example because they are covered by intellectual property laws.
    - slrz 8y ago
      Then let's move on to credit card details. You gave them to me for payment purposes in the course of doing normal business. Months later, I discover that I can sell my stock of credit card information on the darknet for some nice extra income. Should I be allowed to do that? What if it weren't credit card details but just postal addresses?
      - jimmaswell 8y ago
        The credit card example was already illegal by other, more targeted legislation. Nobody likes getting a lot of junk mail, but it's not the end of the world. I actually got my first credit card from a pre-approved offer found in junk mail.
      - wilsonnb 8y ago
        Yes, you should be able to do that, unless you are reasonably certain that the information might be used to commit credit card fraud/identity theft. If you think they might be used illegally, I believe there are already laws to charge you with that relate to facilitating a crime. If you don't think they will be used illegally, then what's the harm in selling them to someone else?

hobofan 8y ago

As it seems that we are making society-wide sweeping statements here, I'll add mine: In a society where the webmasters have shown that they can't uphold their duty to secure PII (or any kind of data really), as evidenced by ~monthly high-profile data leaks, they deserve to be restricted in their "rights to the fruits of their labor".

elephant0xffff 8y ago

> [...] Now if you run a website in the EU, any user who signs up to it has control over the contents of your servers and you have to ask in extremely specific detail to do anything with some of that content, and that "consent" can be revoked at any time. You are saying that's a bad thing? Services that require you to sign up, should provide the possibility for users to look at, modify and delete their user data - that's all. Where's the problem?

jimmaswell 8y ago
Yes, I'm saying that's a bad thing. Someone shouldn't have a right to come into my house and tear up a piece of paper in my drawer if I happened to write something about them on it. The problem is that there's no justification for having the right to coerce other people just because they have information you gave them. If users enter names into your website, you're not allowed to run a statistical analysis of what names are most common on your website without asking. If people named Jane are more likely to eat ice cream, you can't target ice cream ads at them and help keep your site free, without asking them. Worse than just this kind of coercion of what you're not allowed to do, users can coerce you into taking time out of your day to expunge records about them. It's all entirely backwards.
- elephant0xffff 8y ago
  > If people named Jane are more likely to eat ice cream, you can't target ice cream ads at them and help keep your site free, without asking them. Apart from the fact that people named Jane aren't more likely to eat ice cream, you seem to criticize that it gets harder to target ads? Oh no, that's a real pity. Oh no, poor webmasters.
  - jimmaswell 8y ago
    >Oh no, that's a real pity. Oh no, poor webmasters. Why are the rights of people who own websites less important to you than the rights of other people? Regardless, you might not still be saying this once half the websites smaller than Google become subscription-based in the EU or just block the EU altogether.

DanBC 8y ago

Why do you think consent is required?

oaiey 8y ago

I find your view very interesting. You have a very capitalist and US law based perspective on it. For one, not everything in a society needs to allow to "collect the fruits" of individual work (which is essentially capitalism). Europe has much more socialism mixed into their understanding of their societies than the US. Further, the US law is based on risks of heavy punishments but few regulations, while the law in many parts of Europe is based on strict regulations but less high fines. It looks like the EU has too many rules, but that is a subject of perspective. Problem here: The internet gives a shit about borders and society.

lovich 8y ago
Please don't just say this is a US perspective. This is a sociopaths perspective that the current US legal system promotes due to the machinations of the same group of sociopaths. Every business owner here who would complain about how the GPDR is taking their rights to their personally earned data away would be the same people who launch a lawsuit because one of their competitior's products had a typeface that was vaguely similar to theirs There are regular people here, they just don't go starting businesses that have abusing their customers as a business model because they couldn't sleep at night if they did that
- jimmaswell 8y ago
  Targeted ads hardly qualify as abuse to me. Getting to use a website for free in exchange for your browsing data being analyzed is a great deal and a win/win for everybody. Surely anyone who disagrees with your feelings on this matter must be a sociopath, though.
  - s73v3r_ 8y ago
    "Getting to use a website for free in exchange for your browsing data being analyzed is a great deal and a win/win for everybody." Which is why you are perfectly capable of giving consent to other websites to do that. "Surely anyone who disagrees with your feelings on this matter must be a sociopath, though." No, just those who insist on a "take it or leave it" approach.

s73v3r_ 8y ago

"We used to live in a society where webmasters' rights to the fruits of their labor weren't trampled on by inane regulation" We still do. Nothing has changed on that front. "Now if you run a website in the EU, any user who signs up to it has control over the contents of your servers and you have to ask in extremely specific detail to do anything with some of that content, and that "consent" can be revoked at any time." As it should have been from the beginning. Having the standard being that the company hoovers up all your data all the time without telling you what they're doing with it or why they need it was a terrible, terrible thing. "The EU has shot themselves in the foot and more and more companies are going to refuse to do business with them because of it." I highly doubt it.