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Maybe Microsoft will be the first company that has to pay 4% of their global revenue to the EU under GDPR. Microsoft will have a hard time arguing against a gov
by foepys 8y ago
Maybe Microsoft will be the first company that has to pay 4% of their global revenue to the EU under GDPR. Microsoft will have a hard time arguing against a government report
- thrower123 8y agoIt's too bad Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook won't ever stand firm together and tell the EU regulators to get bent and go home.
- bilbo0s 8y agoThere's, I'm guessing, somewhere between 5 and 600 million consumers, er, I mean, people- in Europe. I think that's a large part of the reason they don't stand up to the EU.
- DannyBee 8y agoI hope not for the EU's sake :) That really isn't that huge anymore, and it's definitely not growing that fast. I don't think you want to make a consumer argument because consumers buy expensive stuff everywhere. There are also larger and more growing consumer markets. The better argument would IMHO probably be "They need to sell business products and to businesses there, and the EU businesses are spending more than elsewhere". IE it's a concentration of business wealth. That is also likely to change over time.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoI know, right? Someone has to stand up for the right of these corporations to collect and sell everyone's personal data to the highest bidder.
- adimitrov 8y agoIt's good, though, that the European countries stood together and told Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook to get bent and go home! As an EU citizen, my response to "we're sorry not sorry but due to recent EU laws, we can't continue to offer you this service" is: get bent, go home. I hope we, as the software development community can finally understand and appreciate that the insane proliferation of personal data modern tech has become dependent upon is a Bad Thing.
- kenjackson 8y agoThe problem though is also the complexity. If I want to actually make my product better by knowing if my product crashes in the wild, then it is far more complex to do now in the EU. And in particular the potential risk is huge. For many companies who aren't at the scale of a Google or Microsoft, the best solution is to simply not be available in EU -- at least until you reach such a scale that growth into the EU is required.
- mdekkers 8y agoIf I want to actually make my product better by knowing if my product crashes in the wild There are many ways to achieve that goal. I am not buying the argument that automatic data collection about everything you do is there to "improve our software".
- JustSomeNobody 8y agoInteresting that you think mere tech companies are more powerful than a government union.
- thrower123 8y agoI don't think that we are that far away from that being a reality. Particularly one as shaky and with teeth as small as the EU possesses. The kind of cash that Silicon Valley corps can throw around could be a serious shot in the arm for Eurosceptic political parties hoping to weaken or separate from the union.
- gpvos 8y agoThe EU has more power than individual European countries at least. This is basically the most important reason we still need the EU.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- beagle3 8y agoThere’s precedent; Microsoft outlived the US government in the antitrust case.
- DannyBee 8y agoWell, in practice, the tech companies don't actually need the EU. It depends on the area/tech company of course. But, for example, the number of consumers they represent is only about half a billion. That isn't that many. For example, Latin America has 20% more consumers. Most could totally could afford to ignore the EU if they wanted to and still have a perfectly good business. (This assumes their goal is not all out growth but instead are happy with sustained profit at some point)
- eksemplar 8y agoIf the data is completely anonymous it’s not really breaking the GDPR. If it’s not voluntary they are in a range of other problems though.
- ardy42 8y ago> If the data is completely anonymous it’s not really breaking the GDPR. If it’s not voluntary they are in a range of other problems though. The telemetry can't be completely anonymous. It's attached to an IP address and the EU considers that PII: https://www.enterprisetimes.co.uk/2016/10/20/ecj-rules-ip-address-is-pii/ https://www.enterprisetimes.co.uk/2016/10/20/ecj-rules-ip-ad....
- zip1234 8y agoIf they don't store the IP address it might be OK.
- notimetorelax 8y agoI believe it is a common practice to remove the last part of the IP to make it sufficiently anonymous. Disclaimer: I used to work for Microsoft, and this is what we did.
- pdkl95 8y agoZeroing out the lest-interesting octet of an IPv4 address is only a placebo that doesn't provide any useful anonymity. The other data being collected at the same time almost certainly has enough identifying entropy to correlate a partial IPv4 address with other personally identifying records, probably trivially. For a longer explanation, see my post about the &aip=1 feature in Google Analytics that does the same thing to the end of the IP. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17170468 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17170468
- notimetorelax 8y agoThis is fair, I can only say that we (in my team at least) have gone great lengths to anonymize data as much as possible. No internal user IDs, no user entered text, it got to a point that we were becoming ineffective in diagnostics of outages...