8 ms·
That's exactly what this is. GDPR is untenable and creates magical rights where none exist. You don't own information about you. Data is data. The only reasonab
by epicmellon 8y ago
That's exactly what this is. GDPR is untenable and creates magical rights where none exist. You don't own information about you. Data is data. The only reasonable thing I can see out of it is getting companies to clarify (simplify) their EULAs.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- lawlessone 8y ago>You don't own information about you. What are your credit card numbers? :)
- epicmellon 8y ago(see my window shade example above)
- sandworm101 8y agoCC numbers are something that you definitely do not own. You do not own your credit cards. They are the property of the corporations who issued them to you. That's why they can cancel/alter/confiscate them without going through the courts. Same too for credit ratings. The right to view and alter them comes from various other common law rule (ie slander) but the credit rating itself belongs to the corporation that generates it.
- putlake 8y agoA better analogy is - what is your credit score?
- Uberphallus 8y agoGDPR isn't that much about the data, than about what's done with it.
- xevb3k 8y agoI used to think more like this. Then when I thought about it I decided that essentially all “ownership” rights are like this. Intellectual property and physical property laws are artificial. There is no basic right, they are all rights created where “none exist”. They can be useful though, and part of how we decide what kind of society we want to create. Seems like Europe has decided that privacy and control of data personal data is something they want.
- jrs95 8y agoConsidering that these rules don’t apply to governments, and that European governments generally seem to be slipping towards jailing people for thought crime, I’m skeptical as to how serious they are about privacy and control of personal data.
- epicmellon 8y agoThen there's that.
- dbasedweeb 8y agoPlease if you can, give one example of a European government jailing someone for a thought crime. To save us both time and aggravation please keep the actual definition of “thought crime” in mind, and don’t conflate it with something people actually did.
- sandworm101 8y agoExpression of thoughts can definitely be a crime. Saying that you support X Y or Z organization or ideology can definitely see you jailed. There is also a trend, even in the US, towards keeping some prisoners behind bars for thinking certain thoughts. Sex offenders in many US states can be held long after their sentences based on mental health determinations, determinations that turn on their response to questions: their thoughts. Whereas expression of thoughts can be clearly illegal (ie hate speech) simple consumption, reading, of such thoughts can land the reader in jail too. Governments aren't yet crawling into people's heads, but they are certainly willing to criminalize the communication of illegal thought.
- TremendousJudge 8y agowhy should every company on the planet know everything I do on the Internet?
- kinsomo 8y ago> GDPR...creates magical rights where none exist. You don't own information about you. Data is data. You could literally say that about any property right ever. For instance: common law creates magical rights where none exist. You don't own your toothbrush. Matter is matter. The law can create rights. That's how most rights are created.
- Quenty 8y agoPatents are a great example of this, where we artificially limit an idea, creating an artificial monopoly for 20 years to incentivize inventions and to encourage people to share their ideas so progress is not lost.
- nathan_long 8y agoI'm a fan of privacy legislation, but your comparison is a little strained in my opinion. You have to consciously decide to take me toothbrush, and it deprives me of it. But just seeing me walk by puts "my data" into your mind, and arguably doesn't harm me. Clearly, when a phone network sells my location data to the highest bidder, I'm harmed. But they do need to know my location to provide me service. In general, I think we want services to collect no more data than necessary, discard it as soon as possible, protect what they must store, and disclose it to others as rarely as possible. But all of those things are murkier than "don't take my toothbrush."
- icebraining 8y agoWhy does harm matter to the question raised?
- nathan_long 8y agoMaybe "sole ownership" is a better way to say it. If I have my toothbrush, you don't. My ownership necessarily means that you can't possess it without my permission. Also, if you take it, you can be made to give it back. Data isn't that clear-cut. Your knowing my name and address doesn't take that knowledge from me. It's not obvious that you know it, nor how to make you "give back" that knowledge. So it's less clear what my ownership of that data would mean. Unlike possessions, there's some fuzzy continuum from "clearly it's fine for someone to look at me when I walk past and know what I look like" to "clearly it's not fine for someone to track my every move and sell that knowledge for profit without my consent."
- jellicle 8y agoYou also oppose copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret and official secrets laws, I suppose. DATA IS DATA. There's no nuance possible. It's just DATA, completely removed from the human realm.
- epicmellon 8y agoPatents, yeah. Copyright and trademark are really about fraud than theft. Trade secrets are trade secrets: the violation comes from trying to circumvent security, not having the data itself. So I'd say it is very nuanced ;)
- coding123 8y agoIn copyright law you can still be caught holding illegally some data you obtained even if you did not personally steal the data and was simply given to you by the thief.
- snomad 8y ago> You don't own information about you. Data is data. This seems like a strange stance. Clearly some data is not just data and must be protected, for example Top Secret information. From a broad consumer perspective, we have FERPA and HIPAA, which place restrictions on educational and health information. Have you considered the wild west of no data restrictions was the anomaly, not the other way around? Or, are you of the mind that HIPAA and FERPA should be scrapped?
- epicmellon 8y agoWell, I liken it to window shades. You don't own the photons bouncing off of you so if someone looks in your window and the shades aren't closed, then they aren't stealing your image. If they try to circumvent the protections you put in place, that's different. Same thing with data.
- apocalypstyx 8y agoTaking such arguments all the way to the end, crime becomes only a theoretical construct that can never be practiced, i.g., the safe wasn't strong enough to withstand the explosion: the owner must not have wanted to protect the valuables within enough; someone gets killed: that individual didn't expend enough time and effort to hire sufficient body guards or invest in sufficient bullet-proof attire; a woman is raped: if she had fought back more, had known judo, had been carrying a 12-gauge pump shotgun, it would not have happened. And this completely ignores the difference in scale between a single person looking through a single window and the aggregate data of millions upon millions of human beings.
- hannasanarion 8y agoWell, I liken it to doors. You don't own the air flowing through so if someone reaches in and grabs something, they aren't stealing it. Here's a helpful tip: in our society, the responsibility is on the criminal for doing bad things, not on the individual for not going to enough lengths to stop the criminal.
- empath75 8y ago> That's exactly what this is. GDPR is untenable and creates magical rights where none exist. That's pretty much how laws work.
- xmodem 8y agoGDPR is happening because silicon valley and the adtech industry have been taking the absolute piss for years and Europe is fed up.
- jimmaswell 8y agoEurope sure is fed up with free services and relevant ads. What motivated them to this point, who knows - were tracking ads coming into their houses at night and making a mess of their pots and pans? Do Europeans take some strange enjoyment in having to spend more money, the same as they do for everything from food to taxes?
- blub 8y agoYou're spamming the thread with the same misinformed comment. There are many instances where abuses had real-world consequences, you just need to have the will to find them.
- michaelbuckbee 8y agoAnd if you tried to sketch out what should be in that EULA, you'd probably want to know: - What data is being collected about you - What they're doing to keep that data reasonably secured - Who to contact should have you detect some security issue - How to request that the company stop using your data .....and we've reinvented the GDPR.
- epicmellon 8y agoWell, GDPR requires that you do those things. A clear EULA that says we don't do any of those things so if you don't like it don't use our service would still be illegal under GDPR, right?
- DanBC 8y agoNo, that wouldn't be illegal. Please can you point to the bit of GDPR which you think would make it illegal?
- bcmthrow 8y agoThis is why I am glad that a certain type of technically minded person has zero chance of having any political influence, ever.
- Someone1234 8y agoIt is a guaranteed right enshrined in the EU's Constitution[0] (Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union[1]). Specifically Title II Freedoms: privacy, protection of personal data. That's like claiming the 1st Amendment in the US is just a "magic right." [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_establishing_a_Constitution_for_Europe#Charter_of_Fundamental_Rights_of_the_European_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_establishing_a_Constitu... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_of_Fundamental_Rights_of_the_European_Union#The_text https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_of_Fundamental_Rights_...
- epicmellon 8y agoSee above my comment about practicality. It takes no effort for me to not violate your first amendment rights. It's a negative right, not a positive right.
- Someone1234 8y agoIt takes no effort for you not to violate Title II, just don't ask for other people's personal information.
- jimmaswell 8y agoIt takes effort to set up server access log rotation. It takes effort for a non-technical person to make sure their wordpress installation isn't storing cookies or logs.
- Someone1234 8y agoThe GDPR doesn't require any of that. All you need to do is show a legitimate need to store data if challenged, and access logs have a legitimate purpose (diagnostic and abuse monitoring). Larger businesses (250 employees or more) may need a privacy policy though.
- jimmaswell 8y ago
- vertex-four 8y agoNote that in the US, you have certain rights over a variety of sorts of data - a large and well-known field being that of healthcare data about yourself.
- andrepd 8y agoI swear I don't understand the point of this comment. What you say can be said about private property: it's just a social construct, dependent on government enforcement; or indeed about pretty much any law ever. We decided that people own information about them, and have a right to decide when and how to allow others to use it, and enshrined that right in law.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- simion314 8y agoDon't you have in US strict laws about medical data, so medical data != personal private data
- diffeomorphism 8y agoIn other news HIPAA apparently doesn't exist because "Data is data".