25 ms·

Flattr now deletes your web browsing history within 3 months

128 points by d2wa 8y ago

zerostar07 8y ago
Except its not ‘in practice’ because gdpr does not require such thing. In spirit, maybe [i.e. practically they wouldn't be fined for this]
- notafraudster 8y ago
  It might be reasonable to conclude that, in practice, GDPR has caused a number of companies to their re-assess data collection and retention hygiene (even beyond the minimum bounds of the law). In particular, this change seems to be a very charitable or expansive reading of the requirement under the GDPR for companies not to collect more than is necessary -- as the post ends by noting.
  - merinowool 8y ago
    I think hygiene was mostly in place, but there was no PR points to score. Before GDPR an information that company stores something for 3 months would be a non-news. GDPR doesn't in any way protect people from data leaks.
    - matt4077 8y ago
      > GDPR doesn't in any way protect people from data leaks. If GDPR provides PR reasons for better data hygiene the result is the same: less data retained, less data at risk of being leaked.
    - jdietrich 8y ago
      >GDPR doesn't in any way protect people from data leaks. Article 32: Security of processing Taking into account the state of the art, the costs of implementation and the nature, scope, context and purposes of processing as well as the risk of varying likelihood and severity for the rights and freedoms of natural persons, the controller and the processor shall implement appropriate technical and organisational measures to ensure a level of security appropriate to the risk, including inter alia as appropriate: (a) the pseudonymisation and encryption of personal data; (b) the ability to ensure the ongoing confidentiality, integrity, availability and resilience of processing systems and services; (c) the ability to restore the availability and access to personal data in a timely manner in the event of a physical or technical incident; (d) a process for regularly testing, assessing and evaluating the effectiveness of technical and organisational measures for ensuring the security of the processing. Recital 83: In order to maintain security and to prevent processing in infringement of this Regulation, the controller or processor should evaluate the risks inherent in the processing and implement measures to mitigate those risks, such as encryption. Those measures should ensure an appropriate level of security, including confidentiality, taking into account the state of the art and the costs of implementation in relation to the risks and the nature of the personal data to be protected. In assessing data security risk, consideration should be given to the risks that are presented by personal data processing, such as accidental or unlawful destruction, loss, alteration, unauthorised disclosure of, or access to, personal data transmitted, stored or otherwise processed which may in particular lead to physical, material or non-material damage. GDPR also mitigates the impact of leaks. Art. 5 requires that data is stored for no longer than necessary for the purposes for which it was collected. Art. 33 requires that the supervisory authority must be notified of any data breach within 72 hours. Art. 34 requires that data subjects be notified of any breach without undue delay. All of this is enforceable with heavy fines. https://gdpr-info.eu/art-32-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-32-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-83/ https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-83/
      - merinowool 8y ago
        I can't see how this protects people. You can evaluate risks all the time you want, but unless you have exceptional security team, you won't get your situation improved beyond what's already been established in the industry. Unless you think about companies leaving their databases facing the public without password - but then I still can't see how GDPR would help there. Requirements for post mortem actions are quite sensible though, but given arbitrary rules that is likely only going to be a cash cow for the governments, as even a second of the delay is undue.
        namibj 8y ago
        The criteria for when such a delay is undue in Germany ("ohne schuldhafte Verzoegerung"), is if it would have been within your power and not incurring gross risks/costs (unless it's your fault for creating a situation where there are gross risks/costs) to have done the required action at an earlier time. It is not undue delay if you needed to sleep, or if your ISP just cut you off and you need to go into the city and get some other ISP to get you a connection, but it is your fault if you then sit around for a month, waiting for the ISP to get it ready, without the ISP getting the connection up soon enough. They would require you to go to the city and get a permit to string fiber across from the next hub to your building, if there was no other way to get it done sooner, due to e.g. there not being anyone with free time to dig up the street and fix the cable, or whatever.
- d357r0y3r 8y ago
  It's literally "in practice" if companies are doing this because of GDPR. The fact that they are misinterpreting the guidelines doesn't change the fact that they are making decisions on what they believe are the guidelines.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
    Well, it's like calling a common pointer error "C in practice". You're not wrong, it's just viewing it at a particular angle.
- d2wa 8y ago
  What they’ve done is much cheaper to develop and maintain than implement more granular data deletion tools. Especially when they really don’t need to store the data any longer than one billing period.
  - 13years 8y ago
    Don't they still need to do implement granular deletion to support user requests?
    - joltis 8y ago
      Depends, it's possible to drop user data from a database based on a support request, you don't necessarily have to build a end-user tool for this.
- d2wa 8y ago
  But it does. > “The controller shall implement appropriate technical and organisational measures for ensuring that, by default, only personal data which are necessary for each specific purpose of the processing are processed. That obligation applies to the amount of personal data collected, the extent of their processing, the period of their storage and their accessibility. […]” ― GDPR: Article 25 Data protection by design and by default: Paragraph 2 > “The data subject shall have the right to obtain from the controller the erasure of personal data concerning him or her without undue delay [when] the personal data are no longer necessary in relation to the purposes for which they were collected or otherwise processed;” ― GDPR: Article 17 Right to erasure: Paragraph 1: Point A
- jdietrich 8y ago
  Art. 5: Personal data shall be: kept in a form which permits identification of data subjects for no longer than is necessary for the purposes for which the personal data are processed Recital 39: The personal data should be adequate, relevant and limited to what is necessary for the purposes for which they are processed. This requires, in particular, ensuring that the period for which the personal data are stored is limited to a strict minimum. The GDPR is very explicit on this point. You must delete or thoroughly anonymise personal data as soon as is practically possible. https://gdpr-info.eu/art-5-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-5-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-39/ https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-39/
  - zerostar07 8y ago
    Yes it's quoted in the article too, however "necessary for the purposes" is subject to interpretation, and there is a huge leeway here. In practice it is always possible to claim that some procedure would require retention for longer, and it would be impossible to have them prosecuted for that.
    - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
      If they divvy up a monthly fee to the sites you visit, they're going to have a hard time explaining the need to keep your browsing data more than a single month: Enough time to pay out to the websites. Then you can maybe add a couple months to account for backups and the like. It sounds like trimming the data retention here was well-warranted, particularly given the high sensitivity of browsing data.
dvh 8y ago
Wtf?! Why is micro payment processor even recording browser history?!
- ihuman 8y ago
  From the article: "Flattr subscribers make a voluntary payment from 3 USD/month, install the company’s browser extension which collects their browsing history, and then Flattr divides their subscription fee out among the creators and websites they spent the most time on."
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    That could be done in a totally anonymous way. Add up total number of donations and total number of visits and distribute money accordingly. There is no need for them to ever store personal information for this.
    - CydeWeys 8y ago
      (a) How do you get the total number of visits. (b) This doesn't correctly distribute funds because there is a correlation between how much someone is willing to give per month and what kind of sites they frequent.
      - maxxxxx 8y ago
        You can calculate the numbers as soon as the data about visits come in and then immediately discard all data. You certainly don't need to store the browsing history. You need the payment amount though and even that you can discard after a month. I am going through this at work right now where we are working data collection about a medical device. First we wanted to suck up all data and figure out what to do with it later. Now we have to think about the data use upfront and get that data in the least intrusive way. I requires more thinking but we get the same benefit with only a fraction of the data. GDPR is a good thing because it causes companies to rethink their data collection strategies.
bcoates 8y ago
"Ads on this site don’t track or stalk you. Please disable your blocker." According to my blocker those are Google ads so...
- d2wa 8y ago
  Google AdSense on Ctrl blog is configured to only show non-personalized ads to any users with the Do-Not-Track (DNT) setting enabled or European Economic Area (EEA) citizens. AdSense still uses cookies for rate-limiting and fraud prevention, but not ad personalization or tracking. requestNonPersonalizedAds=1 is part of AdSense’s GDPR APIs. https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/adsense-gdpr-consent https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/adsense-gdpr-consent You also only see that particular message if your browser sends the DNT header, and an adblocker is detected.
  - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    In my case, I don't use an ad blocker, but I do use Privacy Badger, which is only supposed to block tracking, and should only block ads if they can't have their tracking disabled. It looks like Privacy Badger decided "pagead2.googlesyndication.com" should now be blocked as a tracking domain. Perhaps Google should split off their nonpersonalized ads service into a different domain so such services can easily distinguish between the two?
    - d2wa 8y ago
      Actually, this is something that should be fixed in Privacy Badger. They can detect the URL parameter that flips ads from personalized to non-personalized (npa=1) and block accordingly. https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadger/issues/2046 https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadger/issues/2046
      - phicoh 8y ago
        That doesn't make any sense. The point of privacy badger is to prevent cookies that track you across different domains. Allowing tracking cookies just because a certain parameter is present is asking for abuse. If you are serious about not tracking people, don't use tracking cookies.
diafygi 8y ago
I love how some of the tech industry is beginning to see data as a liability rather than an asset. It dramatically reduces the ability for government mass surveillance for two reasons: 1. If companies only collect what they need (to reduce their liability), governments can't demand more than that (or even hack in to get the data illegally). 2. If the industry culture is to limit data collection, governments can't just say, "Well every company does it, so why can't we." There's a wonderful talk, Haunted By Data, that covers a lot of the societal downsides of treating data as an asset. Highly encourage watching/reading. Text: http://idlewords.com/talks/haunted_by_data.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/haunted_by_data.htm Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAXLHM-1Psk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAXLHM-1Psk
- giancarlostoro 8y ago
  Wonder what will happen if the US passes laws enforcing companies to retain data for up to a year minimum for digital forensic integrity reasons of cyber criminal cases. Also maybe on the other hand GDPR is good for VPN services to be much more transparent.
  - amelius 8y ago
    I suspect there will simply be a direct pipe for logging to the government, where companies don't need to retain anything.
    - giancarlostoro 8y ago
      GDPR requires you to make that kind of information available.
      - 13years 8y ago
        However governments often have undisclosed access not even known to the holder of the information. I doubt GDPR will significantly affect information to which the government wants access Can I ask the government to delete all information on me?
AnthonyMouse 8y ago
I feel like this whole thing with the GDPR is people fighting each other for the wrong reasons. The people for it argue that gets large companies to behave better. The people against it argue that it's unnecessarily complicated, poorly drafted and burdensome to small businesses. But it's both at the same time. The issue is that it doesn't have to be. It's possible to get the desired effect without using such a complicated system, and to mitigate the impact it imposes. For example, one of the major burdens on small businesses is the cost of producing the data the company has on you -- but there is a simple way to fix that. Require the requester to pay the cost of collecting the information, similar to FOIA requests in the US. Then the requirement is no longer an unfunded mandate and can't be used by griefers as a method of harassment. Nobody bothered to use common sense like that when drafting it, so now in order to fix it, it has to be thrown out and rewritten. But then the people who support the spirit of the law end up fighting against the people who oppose the letter of the law, even though everybody really wants the same thing.
- Tomte 8y ago
  Your proposed solution gives companies zero incentive to minimize data collected, and even incentivizes them to make fulfilling such a request as convoluted and expensive as possible. What people online love to call "common sense solutions" are usually not solutions a all.
  - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
    > Your proposed solution gives companies zero incentive to minimize data collected The expense of producing the data isn't supposed to be an incentive to minimize data collected, that is what the other sections are for. For large companies it wouldn't be regardless because they could automate the process. > and even incentivizes them to make fulfilling such a request as convoluted and expensive as possible. A company charging outrageous prices would obviously invite investigative scrutiny.
    - Tomte 8y ago
      > A company charging outrageous prices would obviously invite investigative scrutiny. Outrageous? No, just the mere cost that really happens. Say, the data can only be accessed by the CEO personally. For privacy reasons, okay? Very reasonable, and totally in the spirit of the GDPR. It can only be accessed in a very secure server location in Norway. Also commendable. Our CEO needs to travel (first-class air travel) to Norway. He stays in a first-class hotel. Oh, and his time as value, too. So let's say three days business trip, that adds 1 percent of his salary to the bill. Of course, this is an hypothetical, not-really-serious exaggeration. But it demonstrates the effect that would certainly happen on a much smaller scale.
oblong 8y ago
> install the company’s browser extension which collects their browsing history Yeah I think I'll pass thanks. What person would install such a thing?
- d2wa 8y ago
  Well, … people choose to install and use Google Chrome … It all comes down to who you trust with your data.
  - oblong 8y ago
    It's hard to use the internet or live without a web browser, I suspect most people get along just fine without letting a startup with a cool name scrape their browsing history.

128 points by d2wa 8y ago

Except its not ‘in practice’ because gdpr does not require such thing. In spirit, maybe [i.e. practically they wouldn't be fined for this]

notafraudster 8y ago
It might be reasonable to conclude that, in practice, GDPR has caused a number of companies to their re-assess data collection and retention hygiene (even beyond the minimum bounds of the law). In particular, this change seems to be a very charitable or expansive reading of the requirement under the GDPR for companies not to collect more than is necessary -- as the post ends by noting.
- merinowool 8y ago
  I think hygiene was mostly in place, but there was no PR points to score. Before GDPR an information that company stores something for 3 months would be a non-news. GDPR doesn't in any way protect people from data leaks.
  - matt4077 8y ago
    > GDPR doesn't in any way protect people from data leaks. If GDPR provides PR reasons for better data hygiene the result is the same: less data retained, less data at risk of being leaked.
  - jdietrich 8y ago
    >GDPR doesn't in any way protect people from data leaks. Article 32: Security of processing Taking into account the state of the art, the costs of implementation and the nature, scope, context and purposes of processing as well as the risk of varying likelihood and severity for the rights and freedoms of natural persons, the controller and the processor shall implement appropriate technical and organisational measures to ensure a level of security appropriate to the risk, including inter alia as appropriate: (a) the pseudonymisation and encryption of personal data; (b) the ability to ensure the ongoing confidentiality, integrity, availability and resilience of processing systems and services; (c) the ability to restore the availability and access to personal data in a timely manner in the event of a physical or technical incident; (d) a process for regularly testing, assessing and evaluating the effectiveness of technical and organisational measures for ensuring the security of the processing. Recital 83: In order to maintain security and to prevent processing in infringement of this Regulation, the controller or processor should evaluate the risks inherent in the processing and implement measures to mitigate those risks, such as encryption. Those measures should ensure an appropriate level of security, including confidentiality, taking into account the state of the art and the costs of implementation in relation to the risks and the nature of the personal data to be protected. In assessing data security risk, consideration should be given to the risks that are presented by personal data processing, such as accidental or unlawful destruction, loss, alteration, unauthorised disclosure of, or access to, personal data transmitted, stored or otherwise processed which may in particular lead to physical, material or non-material damage. GDPR also mitigates the impact of leaks. Art. 5 requires that data is stored for no longer than necessary for the purposes for which it was collected. Art. 33 requires that the supervisory authority must be notified of any data breach within 72 hours. Art. 34 requires that data subjects be notified of any breach without undue delay. All of this is enforceable with heavy fines. https://gdpr-info.eu/art-32-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-32-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-83/ https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-83/
    - merinowool 8y ago
      I can't see how this protects people. You can evaluate risks all the time you want, but unless you have exceptional security team, you won't get your situation improved beyond what's already been established in the industry. Unless you think about companies leaving their databases facing the public without password - but then I still can't see how GDPR would help there. Requirements for post mortem actions are quite sensible though, but given arbitrary rules that is likely only going to be a cash cow for the governments, as even a second of the delay is undue.
      - namibj 8y ago
        The criteria for when such a delay is undue in Germany ("ohne schuldhafte Verzoegerung"), is if it would have been within your power and not incurring gross risks/costs (unless it's your fault for creating a situation where there are gross risks/costs) to have done the required action at an earlier time. It is not undue delay if you needed to sleep, or if your ISP just cut you off and you need to go into the city and get some other ISP to get you a connection, but it is your fault if you then sit around for a month, waiting for the ISP to get it ready, without the ISP getting the connection up soon enough. They would require you to go to the city and get a permit to string fiber across from the next hub to your building, if there was no other way to get it done sooner, due to e.g. there not being anyone with free time to dig up the street and fix the cable, or whatever.
d357r0y3r 8y ago
It's literally "in practice" if companies are doing this because of GDPR. The fact that they are misinterpreting the guidelines doesn't change the fact that they are making decisions on what they believe are the guidelines.
- dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
  Well, it's like calling a common pointer error "C in practice". You're not wrong, it's just viewing it at a particular angle.
d2wa 8y ago
What they’ve done is much cheaper to develop and maintain than implement more granular data deletion tools. Especially when they really don’t need to store the data any longer than one billing period.
- 13years 8y ago
  Don't they still need to do implement granular deletion to support user requests?
  - joltis 8y ago
    Depends, it's possible to drop user data from a database based on a support request, you don't necessarily have to build a end-user tool for this.
d2wa 8y ago
But it does. > “The controller shall implement appropriate technical and organisational measures for ensuring that, by default, only personal data which are necessary for each specific purpose of the processing are processed. That obligation applies to the amount of personal data collected, the extent of their processing, the period of their storage and their accessibility. […]” ― GDPR: Article 25 Data protection by design and by default: Paragraph 2 > “The data subject shall have the right to obtain from the controller the erasure of personal data concerning him or her without undue delay [when] the personal data are no longer necessary in relation to the purposes for which they were collected or otherwise processed;” ― GDPR: Article 17 Right to erasure: Paragraph 1: Point A
jdietrich 8y ago
Art. 5: Personal data shall be: kept in a form which permits identification of data subjects for no longer than is necessary for the purposes for which the personal data are processed Recital 39: The personal data should be adequate, relevant and limited to what is necessary for the purposes for which they are processed. This requires, in particular, ensuring that the period for which the personal data are stored is limited to a strict minimum. The GDPR is very explicit on this point. You must delete or thoroughly anonymise personal data as soon as is practically possible. https://gdpr-info.eu/art-5-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-5-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-39/ https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-39/
- zerostar07 8y ago
  Yes it's quoted in the article too, however "necessary for the purposes" is subject to interpretation, and there is a huge leeway here. In practice it is always possible to claim that some procedure would require retention for longer, and it would be impossible to have them prosecuted for that.
  - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    If they divvy up a monthly fee to the sites you visit, they're going to have a hard time explaining the need to keep your browsing data more than a single month: Enough time to pay out to the websites. Then you can maybe add a couple months to account for backups and the like. It sounds like trimming the data retention here was well-warranted, particularly given the high sensitivity of browsing data.

dvh 8y ago

Wtf?! Why is micro payment processor even recording browser history?!

ihuman 8y ago
From the article: "Flattr subscribers make a voluntary payment from 3 USD/month, install the company’s browser extension which collects their browsing history, and then Flattr divides their subscription fee out among the creators and websites they spent the most time on."
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  That could be done in a totally anonymous way. Add up total number of donations and total number of visits and distribute money accordingly. There is no need for them to ever store personal information for this.
  - CydeWeys 8y ago
    (a) How do you get the total number of visits. (b) This doesn't correctly distribute funds because there is a correlation between how much someone is willing to give per month and what kind of sites they frequent.
    - maxxxxx 8y ago
      You can calculate the numbers as soon as the data about visits come in and then immediately discard all data. You certainly don't need to store the browsing history. You need the payment amount though and even that you can discard after a month. I am going through this at work right now where we are working data collection about a medical device. First we wanted to suck up all data and figure out what to do with it later. Now we have to think about the data use upfront and get that data in the least intrusive way. I requires more thinking but we get the same benefit with only a fraction of the data. GDPR is a good thing because it causes companies to rethink their data collection strategies.

bcoates 8y ago

"Ads on this site don’t track or stalk you. Please disable your blocker." According to my blocker those are Google ads so...

d2wa 8y ago
Google AdSense on Ctrl blog is configured to only show non-personalized ads to any users with the Do-Not-Track (DNT) setting enabled or European Economic Area (EEA) citizens. AdSense still uses cookies for rate-limiting and fraud prevention, but not ad personalization or tracking. requestNonPersonalizedAds=1 is part of AdSense’s GDPR APIs. https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/adsense-gdpr-consent https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/adsense-gdpr-consent You also only see that particular message if your browser sends the DNT header, and an adblocker is detected.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  In my case, I don't use an ad blocker, but I do use Privacy Badger, which is only supposed to block tracking, and should only block ads if they can't have their tracking disabled. It looks like Privacy Badger decided "pagead2.googlesyndication.com" should now be blocked as a tracking domain. Perhaps Google should split off their nonpersonalized ads service into a different domain so such services can easily distinguish between the two?
  - d2wa 8y ago
    Actually, this is something that should be fixed in Privacy Badger. They can detect the URL parameter that flips ads from personalized to non-personalized (npa=1) and block accordingly. https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadger/issues/2046 https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadger/issues/2046
    - phicoh 8y ago
      That doesn't make any sense. The point of privacy badger is to prevent cookies that track you across different domains. Allowing tracking cookies just because a certain parameter is present is asking for abuse. If you are serious about not tracking people, don't use tracking cookies.

diafygi 8y ago

I love how some of the tech industry is beginning to see data as a liability rather than an asset. It dramatically reduces the ability for government mass surveillance for two reasons: 1. If companies only collect what they need (to reduce their liability), governments can't demand more than that (or even hack in to get the data illegally). 2. If the industry culture is to limit data collection, governments can't just say, "Well every company does it, so why can't we." There's a wonderful talk, Haunted By Data, that covers a lot of the societal downsides of treating data as an asset. Highly encourage watching/reading. Text: http://idlewords.com/talks/haunted_by_data.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/haunted_by_data.htm Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAXLHM-1Psk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAXLHM-1Psk

giancarlostoro 8y ago
Wonder what will happen if the US passes laws enforcing companies to retain data for up to a year minimum for digital forensic integrity reasons of cyber criminal cases. Also maybe on the other hand GDPR is good for VPN services to be much more transparent.
- amelius 8y ago
  I suspect there will simply be a direct pipe for logging to the government, where companies don't need to retain anything.
  - giancarlostoro 8y ago
    GDPR requires you to make that kind of information available.
    - 13years 8y ago
      However governments often have undisclosed access not even known to the holder of the information. I doubt GDPR will significantly affect information to which the government wants access Can I ask the government to delete all information on me?

AnthonyMouse 8y ago

I feel like this whole thing with the GDPR is people fighting each other for the wrong reasons. The people for it argue that gets large companies to behave better. The people against it argue that it's unnecessarily complicated, poorly drafted and burdensome to small businesses. But it's both at the same time. The issue is that it doesn't have to be. It's possible to get the desired effect without using such a complicated system, and to mitigate the impact it imposes. For example, one of the major burdens on small businesses is the cost of producing the data the company has on you -- but there is a simple way to fix that. Require the requester to pay the cost of collecting the information, similar to FOIA requests in the US. Then the requirement is no longer an unfunded mandate and can't be used by griefers as a method of harassment. Nobody bothered to use common sense like that when drafting it, so now in order to fix it, it has to be thrown out and rewritten. But then the people who support the spirit of the law end up fighting against the people who oppose the letter of the law, even though everybody really wants the same thing.

Tomte 8y ago
Your proposed solution gives companies zero incentive to minimize data collected, and even incentivizes them to make fulfilling such a request as convoluted and expensive as possible. What people online love to call "common sense solutions" are usually not solutions a all.
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  > Your proposed solution gives companies zero incentive to minimize data collected The expense of producing the data isn't supposed to be an incentive to minimize data collected, that is what the other sections are for. For large companies it wouldn't be regardless because they could automate the process. > and even incentivizes them to make fulfilling such a request as convoluted and expensive as possible. A company charging outrageous prices would obviously invite investigative scrutiny.
  - Tomte 8y ago
    > A company charging outrageous prices would obviously invite investigative scrutiny. Outrageous? No, just the mere cost that really happens. Say, the data can only be accessed by the CEO personally. For privacy reasons, okay? Very reasonable, and totally in the spirit of the GDPR. It can only be accessed in a very secure server location in Norway. Also commendable. Our CEO needs to travel (first-class air travel) to Norway. He stays in a first-class hotel. Oh, and his time as value, too. So let's say three days business trip, that adds 1 percent of his salary to the bill. Of course, this is an hypothetical, not-really-serious exaggeration. But it demonstrates the effect that would certainly happen on a much smaller scale.

oblong 8y ago

> install the company’s browser extension which collects their browsing history Yeah I think I'll pass thanks. What person would install such a thing?

d2wa 8y ago
Well, … people choose to install and use Google Chrome … It all comes down to who you trust with your data.
- oblong 8y ago
  It's hard to use the internet or live without a web browser, I suspect most people get along just fine without letting a startup with a cool name scrape their browsing history.