6 ms·

We value your privacy now, but maybe not later

239 points by raimue 8y ago

vecnotron 8y ago
this is illegal under GDPR for two reasons: opt-in gained with privacy policy v1 are not valid if gets updated. and you need to opt in by choice not because is the only option
- yeahitslikethat 8y ago
  If you want to use a gopro on your phone you MuST agree to give then your location data. It's the only option.
- wilkskyes 8y ago
  Wouldn't leaving the site be a valid way to opt out?
- Wowfunhappy 8y ago
  Is it just my limited understanding, or are a majority of companies blatantly violating GDPR? I was reading through Vox's privacy policy the other day, on a whim. (I'm in the US, but I was connected to a UK VPN at the time--so if the policy does explicitly change depending on country, they should have thought I was in the EU.) The cookie policy can be summarized as: "We use cookies to track you. If you don't want us to use cookies to track you, you can opt out by setting your browser to block all cookies." Never mind that this would cause a wide range of functionality to not work. And then there's Amazon. I desperately want Amazon to stop showing me personalized recommendations--I don't actually mind the tracking, but I feel as though recommendations push me into a filter bubble. As far as I can tell, there is zero way to do this whatsoever.
tyfon 8y ago
When I see "We value your privacy" I know instantly something shady is going on. The only thing I'll accept is a "Accept" and "Reject all" button next to each other without further clicks. My list of web sites that I actually visit gets smaller and smaller. I have a shortlist and for most of them I pay to remove ads if they have the option and I have all kinds of ad-blocking installed both on the network level and browser level.
- friendly_chap 8y ago
  You are absolutely right, but the sad reality is that we are a small minority. Perhaps we can influence the world by education though.
  - FiveSquared 8y ago
    Well education is a lost cause due to the masses being overworked/ overstressed / overwhelmed/undereducated /etc. I have seen people who write down their password in paper and carry them around. If people can’t remover secure passwords, how are they gonna protect their privacy?
- dman 8y ago
  Time to go back to books and newspapers for information? :)
  - tyfon 8y ago
    No there are still websites that you can pay for and I pay whenever I can. Right now I pay for a local news paper, youtube premium (then ad-block the crap out of it), resetera and di.fm (music). HN doesn't have ads afaik and if it does or try to track me it's blocked. I'd pay for a tracking-free version if that was necessary though. But I do read a lot of books, approximately two a week :) I also play games quite a bit. And I know I can't escape tracking entirely (ip tracking ++) but can be damn sure I will try my hardest!
    - fauigerzigerk 8y ago
      Paying doesn't appear to help one bit. They track you just like before, only now they know your real identity. I'm sure there are exceptions to this general observation, but I haven't found many (apart from some rare VPNs)
      - tyfon 8y ago
        Yes but then I don't have to feel bad for blocking all ads. If I get value out of a site I don't want to freeload.
albertgoeswoof 8y ago
The other thing that is driving me crazy is the dark patterns employed to get you to click accept. Sometimes the reject button has deliberately had the onclick/hover changes removed so it doesn’t feel like a working button, other times it’s buried 3 levels deep etc. What are we supposed to do about these? They have been added to comply with GDPR but clearly don’t.
- duxup 8y ago
  What is funny is that time and again we've found that ... companies will still do what they want it even if "accidentally".
albertgoeswoof 8y ago
From the HN privacy policy: Changes to Y Combinator’s Privacy Policy: The Site and our operations may change from time to time. As a result, at times it may be necessary for Y Combinator to make changes to this Privacy Policy. Y Combinator reserves the right to update or modify this Privacy Policy at any time and from time to time without prior notice. Please review this policy periodically, and especially before you provide any Personal Data. This Privacy Policy was last updated on the date indicated above. Your continued use of the Site after any changes or revisions to this Privacy Policy shall indicate your agreement with the terms of such revised Privacy Policy.
- Despegar 8y ago
  Speaking of HN, how do you delete your account from it?
  - frutiger 8y ago
    What do you want to achieve by deleting your account? I can see basically two options: 1. prevent you (or anyone else) using your handle to post submissions or comments 2. delete all posted submissions and comments in addition to option 1 above; this is a little futile as HN has been indexed and replicated elsewhere EDIT: the following is incorrect, as pointed out by jacobsheehy. I will note that both are possible without any assistance from HN, though perhaps option 2 could be made easier.
    - jacobsheehy 8y ago
      Deleting content does not seem possible on HN, but you're implying that it is? Once you have posted something and walked away, you cannot delete it from HN.
      - frutiger 8y ago
        You’re absolutely right, I had never noticed this before. The delete link disappears after some time.
      - 8y ago
deogeo 8y ago
You go to the local baker and buy a loaf of bread. After you leave, he writes down, on a piece of paper, your name (he knows you, after all), when you arrived, how long you took to choose what to buy, what you bought, and how you paid - bills, credit card, etc. He also writes down if you looked happy, nervous, what you were wearing, if you were with someone, and anything else he can see. He then seals this paper in an envelope, and at night, when no-one is around to see, sells a whole bag of such envelopes to the mining/merchant/transportation conglomerate from the neighboring town, for little more than pocket-change. Would you consider such a person a good neighbor?
- mLuby 8y ago
  No, but someone giving bread away for free and doing that wouldn't be so clearly bad. I think the difference is the obvious exchange of value (money for bread) in the first case suggests that's the entirety of the transaction. So the baker additionally "taking" the customer's data feels like stealing. But in the second case, it feels more acceptable that the exchange is (data for bread) since we all know there's no free lunch. There's a reason when you give someone something for free they ask "what's the catch?".
  - josho 8y ago
    In my case I’m not buying bread nor being given the bread. I just browsed the neighboring store and this baker still has those details on me. Ie. I use no google products. Yet by just surfing the web and being tracked through google’s products or by emailing people with gmail, google has almost as much information on me as if I were their user.
  - est31 8y ago
    Mobile phone carriers take your money and still sell your data. Same for some credit card companies.
  - FiveSquared 8y ago
    And the lack of clarity. The People You May Know things on FB is due to contacts being shared, which is pressed into the user. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2017/07/30/why-facebooks-people-you-may-know-makes-some-weird-suggestions/521264001/https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2017/07/30/why-facebooks-people-you-may-know-makes-some-weird-suggestions/521264001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2017/07/30/why...
deanCommie 8y ago
GDPR execution has been a dumpster fire of usability dark patterns and user hostile design. The web has not had this many pop-ups since the 1990s.
- sakisv 8y ago
  The problem is not with the pop-ups, but with how many dark patterns are involved in getting your consent. They could have made a simple pop-up, in simple language with two clear options and an optional dropdown showing all the "providers" but then again that would have been too user friendly. Maybe GDPR should be revised to address these things, maybe even provide a template with 5 different color schemes that everyone should be forced to use.
  - fabrika 8y ago
    The problem for the majority of the visitors are pop-ups. Everyone just clicks the green button. No time to read two clear options or bother with dropdowns. That's how people behave. These pop-ups are required by GDPR. If your site doesn't have a pop-up you risk losing 20M Euro.
- groestl 8y ago
  This has very little to do with the GDPR. The GDPR allows the use of cookies under various provisions, and does not necessarily require user consent. These popups are about the ePrivacy directive (aka "cookie law"): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_and_Electronic_Communications_Directive_2002 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_and_Electronic_Commu...
duxup 8y ago
It really seems like the only good privacy policy is "We just don't collect X data, ever." I don't know if I would trust it, but it would be the only one that I would have even a tidbit of faith in / think that it represents a good faith offer. If they do collect it, I just assume it is being stored in the name of selling it. At this point it seems to be a foregone conclusion.
cygned 8y ago
I noticed that some of these often-used cookie accept overlays take an awful long time to apply my choice (up to a minute) when I opt out of all non-required cookies. I guess that is on purpose to annoy me to click “Accept all” anyway. I don’t expect that they value my choice either.
phoe-krk 8y ago
Of course we value your privacy. In US dollars.
martimarkov 8y ago
I really want to see companies getting fined for breaking the GDPR. Even better would be if they got a few companies to a bankruptcy lvl. Mainly so we get rid of the dark patterns. Just have 3 options: Accept All, Reject All, Custom I hate it when the only option is accept or when I get redirected to a 3rd party website which tells me I need to enable 3rd party cookies for them to not track me... well fuck you guys, I don’t want to enable them. My solution so far is: Ghostery + DuckDuckGo + uBlock Origins + PiHole. Any other suggestions are welcomed.
andr 8y ago
I can understand that quite a few companies' commercial product is your personal information (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and even news media nowadays). What is scaring me is companies that have a different business model using the same techniques to sell your information. Today I noticed that Dropbox.com login does not work with the Ghostery ad blocker enabled. Ghostery blocked a total of 48 items on Dropbox.com, including 22 trackers. For a company that I pay $100/yr and trust with all my personal files, that number should be 0, everything else is a breach of my trust.
- thoughtstheseus 8y ago
  Yeah, unfortunately, spying on people is the norm. I have little confidence these business models will work in the long-run. Hopefully.
alexandercrohde 8y ago
Serious question -- how can this be legal? Think about it. For all I know tomorrow the policy could say "You agree to pay the site all your savings?" This sort of prior blank-check consent seems to lead to absurd scenarios when thought about.
- teknopaul 8y ago
  How can this be legal? Maybe it isn't; you have to file GDPR complaints.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  I’m willing to bet it’s not enforceable, and in court it would not hold up for a company to claim their new privacy policy was intrinsically consented to by virtue of site usage alone. The purpose is probably just to add legal obfuscation and extra cost burdens in the process of suing a company over privacy issues. It costs them little to add legalese like this to their policy, and may possibly create some gargantuan burden of effort in the future to argue that it’s not enforceable, just further reducing the number of would-be lawsuits to challenge them.
twblalock 8y ago
Privacy policies can change at any time, but that's not the only problem. Companies that hold your private data can be hacked. They can be acquired by new owners who don't care about privacy. Even if you trust a company with your private data, and even if you are fully informed about the data that they collect and what they use it for, you will have no control over what happens to that data eventually.
techslave 8y ago
> Would you agree to a contract that can be changed by the other party at any time in any way? A privacy policy is not a contract. Of course it has to be (and should be) updatable. The privacy landscape changes over time. The way these things are, is actually perfect. It means, you can ignore it entirely because the company has complete discretion on whether to abide or not. The only thing you have to go by, is reputational considerations (which doesn't recover your lost privacy), and absolute legal requirements that exist outside of any policy statement, eg GDPR, COPPA, HIPAA.
- groestl 8y ago
  > A privacy policy is not a contract Exactly. Why Atlas Obscura even uses language about "agreement" ("[...], you are agreeing to such modifications.") is beyond me. It might even result in more legal exposure and restrict their freedom to move within the limits of the GDPR to rely on user consent (provided they even want to comply with the GDPR as a Delaware Corp).
Animats 8y ago
A contract which allows one party to change the terms may not be a valid contract at all. There's a legal truism, "an agreement to agree is not an agreement."[1] This comes up regularly in "letter of intent" cases. The rules vary by state. New York is very negative on "agreements to agree".[2] Putting a phrase like that in a contract may weaken the position of the party putting it there. Any comments from lawyers? [1] https://www.blaney.com/articles/agreements-to-agree-do-they-bind-you-or-not-court-decisions-resting-on-specific-provisions-1 https://www.blaney.com/articles/agreements-to-agree-do-they-... [2] https://scarincihollenbeck.com/law-firm-insights/agreement-to-agree-ny/ https://scarincihollenbeck.com/law-firm-insights/agreement-t...
benatkin 8y ago
I guessed that the title was about startups that value privacy but still collect too much data. When they get acquired by a typical giant corporation, they don't value privacy but still have lots of data. The modification clause is what enables them to misuse peoples' data.
dennisgorelik 8y ago
I just opened atlasobscura.com There is no privacy popup for me. I am in the US, so EU laws are not applicable here. I blame EU GDPR laws for the popup that Rainer Müller suffered from.
- rebuilder 8y ago
  IOW you don't even get notice they're tracking you. Is that an improvement?
- raimue 8y ago
  Thanks, that is indeed an interesting detail. However, you have to assume they use your data the same way, they just do not ask for your consent.
Felz 8y ago
As someone who recently put together a privacy policy myself, I can assure you that an updating clause is standard practice for both privacy policies and terms of service. The documents are really mostly for minimizing liability. You can object to that, sure, but no sane company is going to open themselves up to lawsuits just because a few users are upset about it.
kmlx 8y ago
the last time i’ve seen such a drive for privacy was during the USSR, where the state wiuld actually kill or at least torture you. so you had to hide everything from them. this led to a broken society, where everyone lied to eachother over the most basic things (e.g. going out, eating a loaf of bread etc). that’s one of the reasons i escaped to the western world, where transparency was the norm, where no one cared what you had for breakfast, where there was no real threat to your life due to over exposure. fast forward to today, and it feels like the west is developing into the USSR, but without the threats to life, just the “hide everything about you” part. it also feels like a partly nativist europe vs the rest of the world. now it seems i have to escape yet again to parts of asia where they don’t worry about stuff like this. edit: at the last minute i’m reminded that this is just the HN bubble, and outside Europe people still act normal and don’t care about this stuff.

239 points by raimue 8y ago

this is illegal under GDPR for two reasons: opt-in gained with privacy policy v1 are not valid if gets updated. and you need to opt in by choice not because is the only option

yeahitslikethat 8y ago
If you want to use a gopro on your phone you MuST agree to give then your location data. It's the only option.
wilkskyes 8y ago
Wouldn't leaving the site be a valid way to opt out?
Wowfunhappy 8y ago
Is it just my limited understanding, or are a majority of companies blatantly violating GDPR? I was reading through Vox's privacy policy the other day, on a whim. (I'm in the US, but I was connected to a UK VPN at the time--so if the policy does explicitly change depending on country, they should have thought I was in the EU.) The cookie policy can be summarized as: "We use cookies to track you. If you don't want us to use cookies to track you, you can opt out by setting your browser to block all cookies." Never mind that this would cause a wide range of functionality to not work. And then there's Amazon. I desperately want Amazon to stop showing me personalized recommendations--I don't actually mind the tracking, but I feel as though recommendations push me into a filter bubble. As far as I can tell, there is zero way to do this whatsoever.

tyfon 8y ago

When I see "We value your privacy" I know instantly something shady is going on. The only thing I'll accept is a "Accept" and "Reject all" button next to each other without further clicks. My list of web sites that I actually visit gets smaller and smaller. I have a shortlist and for most of them I pay to remove ads if they have the option and I have all kinds of ad-blocking installed both on the network level and browser level.

friendly_chap 8y ago
You are absolutely right, but the sad reality is that we are a small minority. Perhaps we can influence the world by education though.
- FiveSquared 8y ago
  Well education is a lost cause due to the masses being overworked/ overstressed / overwhelmed/undereducated /etc. I have seen people who write down their password in paper and carry them around. If people can’t remover secure passwords, how are they gonna protect their privacy?
dman 8y ago
Time to go back to books and newspapers for information? :)
- tyfon 8y ago
  No there are still websites that you can pay for and I pay whenever I can. Right now I pay for a local news paper, youtube premium (then ad-block the crap out of it), resetera and di.fm (music). HN doesn't have ads afaik and if it does or try to track me it's blocked. I'd pay for a tracking-free version if that was necessary though. But I do read a lot of books, approximately two a week :) I also play games quite a bit. And I know I can't escape tracking entirely (ip tracking ++) but can be damn sure I will try my hardest!
  - fauigerzigerk 8y ago
    Paying doesn't appear to help one bit. They track you just like before, only now they know your real identity. I'm sure there are exceptions to this general observation, but I haven't found many (apart from some rare VPNs)
    - tyfon 8y ago
      Yes but then I don't have to feel bad for blocking all ads. If I get value out of a site I don't want to freeload.

albertgoeswoof 8y ago

The other thing that is driving me crazy is the dark patterns employed to get you to click accept. Sometimes the reject button has deliberately had the onclick/hover changes removed so it doesn’t feel like a working button, other times it’s buried 3 levels deep etc. What are we supposed to do about these? They have been added to comply with GDPR but clearly don’t.

duxup 8y ago
What is funny is that time and again we've found that ... companies will still do what they want it even if "accidentally".

albertgoeswoof 8y ago

From the HN privacy policy: Changes to Y Combinator’s Privacy Policy: The Site and our operations may change from time to time. As a result, at times it may be necessary for Y Combinator to make changes to this Privacy Policy. Y Combinator reserves the right to update or modify this Privacy Policy at any time and from time to time without prior notice. Please review this policy periodically, and especially before you provide any Personal Data. This Privacy Policy was last updated on the date indicated above. Your continued use of the Site after any changes or revisions to this Privacy Policy shall indicate your agreement with the terms of such revised Privacy Policy.

Despegar 8y ago
Speaking of HN, how do you delete your account from it?
- frutiger 8y ago
  What do you want to achieve by deleting your account? I can see basically two options: 1. prevent you (or anyone else) using your handle to post submissions or comments 2. delete all posted submissions and comments in addition to option 1 above; this is a little futile as HN has been indexed and replicated elsewhere EDIT: the following is incorrect, as pointed out by jacobsheehy. I will note that both are possible without any assistance from HN, though perhaps option 2 could be made easier.
  - jacobsheehy 8y ago
    Deleting content does not seem possible on HN, but you're implying that it is? Once you have posted something and walked away, you cannot delete it from HN.
    - frutiger 8y ago
      You’re absolutely right, I had never noticed this before. The delete link disappears after some time.
    - 8y ago

deogeo 8y ago

You go to the local baker and buy a loaf of bread. After you leave, he writes down, on a piece of paper, your name (he knows you, after all), when you arrived, how long you took to choose what to buy, what you bought, and how you paid - bills, credit card, etc. He also writes down if you looked happy, nervous, what you were wearing, if you were with someone, and anything else he can see. He then seals this paper in an envelope, and at night, when no-one is around to see, sells a whole bag of such envelopes to the mining/merchant/transportation conglomerate from the neighboring town, for little more than pocket-change. Would you consider such a person a good neighbor?

mLuby 8y ago
No, but someone giving bread away for free and doing that wouldn't be so clearly bad. I think the difference is the obvious exchange of value (money for bread) in the first case suggests that's the entirety of the transaction. So the baker additionally "taking" the customer's data feels like stealing. But in the second case, it feels more acceptable that the exchange is (data for bread) since we all know there's no free lunch. There's a reason when you give someone something for free they ask "what's the catch?".
- josho 8y ago
  In my case I’m not buying bread nor being given the bread. I just browsed the neighboring store and this baker still has those details on me. Ie. I use no google products. Yet by just surfing the web and being tracked through google’s products or by emailing people with gmail, google has almost as much information on me as if I were their user.
- est31 8y ago
  Mobile phone carriers take your money and still sell your data. Same for some credit card companies.
- FiveSquared 8y ago
  And the lack of clarity. The People You May Know things on FB is due to contacts being shared, which is pressed into the user. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2017/07/30/why-facebooks-people-you-may-know-makes-some-weird-suggestions/521264001/https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2017/07/30/why-facebooks-people-you-may-know-makes-some-weird-suggestions/521264001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2017/07/30/why...

deanCommie 8y ago

GDPR execution has been a dumpster fire of usability dark patterns and user hostile design. The web has not had this many pop-ups since the 1990s.

sakisv 8y ago
The problem is not with the pop-ups, but with how many dark patterns are involved in getting your consent. They could have made a simple pop-up, in simple language with two clear options and an optional dropdown showing all the "providers" but then again that would have been too user friendly. Maybe GDPR should be revised to address these things, maybe even provide a template with 5 different color schemes that everyone should be forced to use.
- fabrika 8y ago
  The problem for the majority of the visitors are pop-ups. Everyone just clicks the green button. No time to read two clear options or bother with dropdowns. That's how people behave. These pop-ups are required by GDPR. If your site doesn't have a pop-up you risk losing 20M Euro.
groestl 8y ago
This has very little to do with the GDPR. The GDPR allows the use of cookies under various provisions, and does not necessarily require user consent. These popups are about the ePrivacy directive (aka "cookie law"): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_and_Electronic_Communications_Directive_2002 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_and_Electronic_Commu...

duxup 8y ago

It really seems like the only good privacy policy is "We just don't collect X data, ever." I don't know if I would trust it, but it would be the only one that I would have even a tidbit of faith in / think that it represents a good faith offer. If they do collect it, I just assume it is being stored in the name of selling it. At this point it seems to be a foregone conclusion.

cygned 8y ago

I noticed that some of these often-used cookie accept overlays take an awful long time to apply my choice (up to a minute) when I opt out of all non-required cookies. I guess that is on purpose to annoy me to click “Accept all” anyway. I don’t expect that they value my choice either.

phoe-krk 8y ago

Of course we value your privacy. In US dollars.

martimarkov 8y ago

I really want to see companies getting fined for breaking the GDPR. Even better would be if they got a few companies to a bankruptcy lvl. Mainly so we get rid of the dark patterns. Just have 3 options: Accept All, Reject All, Custom I hate it when the only option is accept or when I get redirected to a 3rd party website which tells me I need to enable 3rd party cookies for them to not track me... well fuck you guys, I don’t want to enable them. My solution so far is: Ghostery + DuckDuckGo + uBlock Origins + PiHole. Any other suggestions are welcomed.

andr 8y ago

I can understand that quite a few companies' commercial product is your personal information (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and even news media nowadays). What is scaring me is companies that have a different business model using the same techniques to sell your information. Today I noticed that Dropbox.com login does not work with the Ghostery ad blocker enabled. Ghostery blocked a total of 48 items on Dropbox.com, including 22 trackers. For a company that I pay $100/yr and trust with all my personal files, that number should be 0, everything else is a breach of my trust.

thoughtstheseus 8y ago
Yeah, unfortunately, spying on people is the norm. I have little confidence these business models will work in the long-run. Hopefully.

alexandercrohde 8y ago

Serious question -- how can this be legal? Think about it. For all I know tomorrow the policy could say "You agree to pay the site all your savings?" This sort of prior blank-check consent seems to lead to absurd scenarios when thought about.

teknopaul 8y ago
How can this be legal? Maybe it isn't; you have to file GDPR complaints.
mlthoughts2018 8y ago
I’m willing to bet it’s not enforceable, and in court it would not hold up for a company to claim their new privacy policy was intrinsically consented to by virtue of site usage alone. The purpose is probably just to add legal obfuscation and extra cost burdens in the process of suing a company over privacy issues. It costs them little to add legalese like this to their policy, and may possibly create some gargantuan burden of effort in the future to argue that it’s not enforceable, just further reducing the number of would-be lawsuits to challenge them.

twblalock 8y ago

Privacy policies can change at any time, but that's not the only problem. Companies that hold your private data can be hacked. They can be acquired by new owners who don't care about privacy. Even if you trust a company with your private data, and even if you are fully informed about the data that they collect and what they use it for, you will have no control over what happens to that data eventually.

techslave 8y ago

> Would you agree to a contract that can be changed by the other party at any time in any way? A privacy policy is not a contract. Of course it has to be (and should be) updatable. The privacy landscape changes over time. The way these things are, is actually perfect. It means, you can ignore it entirely because the company has complete discretion on whether to abide or not. The only thing you have to go by, is reputational considerations (which doesn't recover your lost privacy), and absolute legal requirements that exist outside of any policy statement, eg GDPR, COPPA, HIPAA.

groestl 8y ago
> A privacy policy is not a contract Exactly. Why Atlas Obscura even uses language about "agreement" ("[...], you are agreeing to such modifications.") is beyond me. It might even result in more legal exposure and restrict their freedom to move within the limits of the GDPR to rely on user consent (provided they even want to comply with the GDPR as a Delaware Corp).

Animats 8y ago

A contract which allows one party to change the terms may not be a valid contract at all. There's a legal truism, "an agreement to agree is not an agreement."[1] This comes up regularly in "letter of intent" cases. The rules vary by state. New York is very negative on "agreements to agree".[2] Putting a phrase like that in a contract may weaken the position of the party putting it there. Any comments from lawyers? [1] https://www.blaney.com/articles/agreements-to-agree-do-they-bind-you-or-not-court-decisions-resting-on-specific-provisions-1 https://www.blaney.com/articles/agreements-to-agree-do-they-... [2] https://scarincihollenbeck.com/law-firm-insights/agreement-to-agree-ny/ https://scarincihollenbeck.com/law-firm-insights/agreement-t...

benatkin 8y ago

I guessed that the title was about startups that value privacy but still collect too much data. When they get acquired by a typical giant corporation, they don't value privacy but still have lots of data. The modification clause is what enables them to misuse peoples' data.

dennisgorelik 8y ago

I just opened atlasobscura.com There is no privacy popup for me. I am in the US, so EU laws are not applicable here. I blame EU GDPR laws for the popup that Rainer Müller suffered from.

rebuilder 8y ago
IOW you don't even get notice they're tracking you. Is that an improvement?
raimue 8y ago
Thanks, that is indeed an interesting detail. However, you have to assume they use your data the same way, they just do not ask for your consent.

Felz 8y ago

As someone who recently put together a privacy policy myself, I can assure you that an updating clause is standard practice for both privacy policies and terms of service. The documents are really mostly for minimizing liability. You can object to that, sure, but no sane company is going to open themselves up to lawsuits just because a few users are upset about it.

kmlx 8y ago

the last time i’ve seen such a drive for privacy was during the USSR, where the state wiuld actually kill or at least torture you. so you had to hide everything from them. this led to a broken society, where everyone lied to eachother over the most basic things (e.g. going out, eating a loaf of bread etc). that’s one of the reasons i escaped to the western world, where transparency was the norm, where no one cared what you had for breakfast, where there was no real threat to your life due to over exposure. fast forward to today, and it feels like the west is developing into the USSR, but without the threats to life, just the “hide everything about you” part. it also feels like a partly nativist europe vs the rest of the world. now it seems i have to escape yet again to parts of asia where they don’t worry about stuff like this. edit: at the last minute i’m reminded that this is just the HN bubble, and outside Europe people still act normal and don’t care about this stuff.