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That's fine for you Europeans under GDPR. (Sure, there's careouts for weird exceptions.) That doesn't do diddly for us US citizens living in the US. Our data p

That's fine for you Europeans under GDPR. (Sure, there's careouts for weird exceptions.) That doesn't do diddly for us US citizens living in the US. Our data policy is "we will sell your data, too bad so sad".

jlarocco 8y ago
It is kind of our own fault, though. Judging by the sentiment on HN when GDPR was coming into effect, if something like it came up for a vote in the US, a lot of HN users and other tech people would vote against it. There was no shortage of angry geeks posting articles about their service turning away EU users rather than complying with GDPR.
- thisisweirdok 8y ago
  I would hope that those people would at this point realize that the upset about the GDPR was completely overblown?
- rock_hard 8y ago
  This is a double edged sword...in the EU it doesn't matter because they didn't have a internet economy to begin with but here in the US a lot is at stake. So if you want better privacy laws in the US then they have to be much more clever than GDPR to not destroy the economy and global competitiveness! BTW: Personally I think it is possible to do better than GDPR here in the US.
  - wahern 8y ago
    As a percentage of GDP the so-called "digital economy" isn't much less in the EU than in the U.S. See, e.g., https://www.imf.org/~/media/Files/Publications/PP/2018/022818MeasuringDigitalEconomy.ashx https://www.imf.org/~/media/Files/Publications/PP/2018/02281... Excluding the U.K. and Ireland (tax haven) the difference between the EU and U.S. is greater, but (eyeballing) only on the order of 30-50%--e.g. ~4% vs ~6%. What's more surprising is how small the share of GDP is the digital economy in the U.S. That said, "digital economy" may be a poor proxy for understanding the impact of privacy regulations. It's a superset of tech industries, including much more than those parts which broker private information and to that extent would overestimate the impact. OTOH, I presume "digital economy" excludes large parts of non-tech industries (i.e. traditional sales and marketing companies, TV and newspaper ads, etc) and thus underestimates the potential impact.
    - rock_hard 8y ago
      I guess it depends on your definition of digital economy...I was referring to companies of the size and influence like Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Oracle, Airbnb, Tesla, SpaceX, etc
- Tsubasachan 8y ago
  If you work in tech or marketing your salary comes from eroding privacy. There is a lot of money at stake here and people don't vote against their interests. Europeans aren't inherently better: if Facebook and Google were companies founded in Germany or France who knows if GDPR would exist.
  - jlarocco 8y ago
    I don't know if I'd say that. "Tech" is a really big field, and most areas don't have anything to do with eroding privacy. Unfortunately, many areas that would have been "safe" years ago, like games and standalone applications, are moving in the direction of violating privacy by phoning home and sending "telemetry" data, but there's still a lot of areas that are good.
    - crankylinuxuser 8y ago
      I'm a sysad for a small company. We have an on-prem solution and a social media app. We don't sell our data. We don't trade it. And we adhere to a fedramp medium (in spirit), even though the social media site wasn't checked for that. Users have control over their profile, and we admins cant even read it (unless we read raw DB, and we dont). And deletion requests entail in zeroing out all user's data. The next day, zeroed data is then purged completely. Seriously, companies can do this right. And I work for one that absolutely does this right.
  - irrational 8y ago
    I work in tech, but my and my companies work definitely doesn't involve eroding anyone's privacy.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    Europeans aren't inherently better: if Facebook and Google were companies founded in Germany or France who knows if GDPR would exist. The Data Protection Directive, which the GDPR merely extends and updates, is older than Google and almost as old as the web itself, and was an attempt to unify even older national laws regarding personal data. It's not a reaction to having "lost" the privacy-eroding race.
- dylan604 8y ago
  Were these people that actively work on projects that depend on this data for their business to remain viable?

jlarocco 8y ago

It is kind of our own fault, though. Judging by the sentiment on HN when GDPR was coming into effect, if something like it came up for a vote in the US, a lot of HN users and other tech people would vote against it. There was no shortage of angry geeks posting articles about their service turning away EU users rather than complying with GDPR.

thisisweirdok 8y ago
I would hope that those people would at this point realize that the upset about the GDPR was completely overblown?
rock_hard 8y ago
This is a double edged sword...in the EU it doesn't matter because they didn't have a internet economy to begin with but here in the US a lot is at stake. So if you want better privacy laws in the US then they have to be much more clever than GDPR to not destroy the economy and global competitiveness! BTW: Personally I think it is possible to do better than GDPR here in the US.
- wahern 8y ago
  As a percentage of GDP the so-called "digital economy" isn't much less in the EU than in the U.S. See, e.g., https://www.imf.org/~/media/Files/Publications/PP/2018/022818MeasuringDigitalEconomy.ashx https://www.imf.org/~/media/Files/Publications/PP/2018/02281... Excluding the U.K. and Ireland (tax haven) the difference between the EU and U.S. is greater, but (eyeballing) only on the order of 30-50%--e.g. ~4% vs ~6%. What's more surprising is how small the share of GDP is the digital economy in the U.S. That said, "digital economy" may be a poor proxy for understanding the impact of privacy regulations. It's a superset of tech industries, including much more than those parts which broker private information and to that extent would overestimate the impact. OTOH, I presume "digital economy" excludes large parts of non-tech industries (i.e. traditional sales and marketing companies, TV and newspaper ads, etc) and thus underestimates the potential impact.
  - rock_hard 8y ago
    I guess it depends on your definition of digital economy...I was referring to companies of the size and influence like Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Oracle, Airbnb, Tesla, SpaceX, etc
Tsubasachan 8y ago
If you work in tech or marketing your salary comes from eroding privacy. There is a lot of money at stake here and people don't vote against their interests. Europeans aren't inherently better: if Facebook and Google were companies founded in Germany or France who knows if GDPR would exist.
- jlarocco 8y ago
  I don't know if I'd say that. "Tech" is a really big field, and most areas don't have anything to do with eroding privacy. Unfortunately, many areas that would have been "safe" years ago, like games and standalone applications, are moving in the direction of violating privacy by phoning home and sending "telemetry" data, but there's still a lot of areas that are good.
  - crankylinuxuser 8y ago
    I'm a sysad for a small company. We have an on-prem solution and a social media app. We don't sell our data. We don't trade it. And we adhere to a fedramp medium (in spirit), even though the social media site wasn't checked for that. Users have control over their profile, and we admins cant even read it (unless we read raw DB, and we dont). And deletion requests entail in zeroing out all user's data. The next day, zeroed data is then purged completely. Seriously, companies can do this right. And I work for one that absolutely does this right.
- irrational 8y ago
  I work in tech, but my and my companies work definitely doesn't involve eroding anyone's privacy.
- icebraining 8y ago
  Europeans aren't inherently better: if Facebook and Google were companies founded in Germany or France who knows if GDPR would exist. The Data Protection Directive, which the GDPR merely extends and updates, is older than Google and almost as old as the web itself, and was an attempt to unify even older national laws regarding personal data. It's not a reaction to having "lost" the privacy-eroding race.
dylan604 8y ago
Were these people that actively work on projects that depend on this data for their business to remain viable?