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IMO, it seemed that the purpose of GDPR was to create a legal arrangement to tax/fine Google (and other big US tech companies). The fine was going to happen one

IMO, it seemed that the purpose of GDPR was to create a legal arrangement to tax/fine Google (and other big US tech companies). The fine was going to happen one way or another, the question was just how big it would be in the end. For some context on why: consider those "cookie" notices you see on every site now. The notices are often obtrusive, usually don't have a "no" button, don't make it clear how to withdraw your consent if you do click "yes"... So if every company is in violation, and no one knows how to do it correctly even with millions of reasons why... Then how exactly is it going to protect user privacy in the real world?

jacquesm 8y ago
If that is what you got from the available materials and the track record of the EU DPAs to date then you should probably do some more reading. EU companies have as much or more stake in being compliant than the few US tech giants active on EU soil. I see the impact of the GDPR on EU based companies every week and it is definitely moving the needle towards more secure operations and a much better attitude towards stewardship of data-subject related data.
- Mirioron 8y ago
  But there are few major EU tech companies in the first place. These kinds of rules are going to hurt foreign companies because they're the major players in the market. I'm European and I barely use anything made by European tech companies in terms of final products. I'm sure there are some networking chips or similar in some of the devices I use, but the major software and hardware I use is made and designed outside of the EU. Now I would argue that the reason we don't have many major tech companies in the EU is because of a hostile environment for them here. I really can't think of many other reasons. The EU has more people than the US that are about as educated. There's at least a comparable amount of capital around, our internet connectivity is actually better, but we have very few major tech companies, even fewer ones that focus on internet stuff. Why is this important? Because if eventually we want to build automation to do other jobs then we need a lot if qualified tech workers.
  - barry-cotter 8y ago
    > But there are few major EU tech companies in the first place. That’s not accurate. One ≠ a few. The only major European tech company is SAP.
    - jacquesm 8y ago
      Alphabetically: ABB, Adyen, Airbus, Alstom, ASML, BAE, Booking, Ericsson, Logitech, Philips, SAP, Siemens, Spotify, Teamviewer, TomTom. Not going to spend more than two minutes on this, by the time you do some more reading you will likely end up with 100+ companies on this list.
      - barry-cotter 8y ago
        That’s three software companies, (Booking, SAP and Spotify) one of which I mentioned, one of which is a wholly owned subsidiary of an American company. I concede on Spotify, though it is worth one tenth of SAP. I regret I was unclear, using tech instead of software. The top five most valuable companies in the world are all US software companies. The only European software company on that list is SAP. Oracle, Netflix and Salesforce also make the cut. SAP is worth 15% of Apple, 25% of Facebook, just barely less than Netflix. Alibaba and Tencent are in the global top ten. China has big tech companies like the US does. Europe does not. https://www.statista.com/statistics/263264/top-companies-in-the-world-by-market-value/#0 https://www.statista.com/statistics/263264/top-companies-in-...
        NeedMoreTea 8y ago
        Did ARM count? China and the US have a huge single language market. The EU has a single market with tons of languages. It's much harder for a British or German startup to spread EU wide equivalent to how a US startup can achieve reach across the US and Canada. The EU single market only partially mitigates the problem. Single language seems to count much more than a single jurisdiction. The usual pattern is when someone in the EU gets interesting, they get bought by a larger US outfit. I don't think China yet allows full foreign takeovers, or a selection of their majors might now be US owned or shuttered too. The other standout in your list, Samsung, is a typical huge conglomerate - TVs, monitors, phones, cameras, memory, storage etc, and part of the larger conglomerate with fingers in everything from fridges to ship building.
- ggggtez 8y ago
  I don't claim to be an expert, but this random site claims that British companies have suffers 10k data breaches [0]. According to this, there have only been 91 fines. I don't see how someone can come to the conclusion that this is actually helping data be more secure. [0] https://tech.newstatesman.com/gdpr/data-breaches-gdpr https://tech.newstatesman.com/gdpr/data-breaches-gdpr
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    > I don't see how someone can come to the conclusion that this is actually helping data be more secure. The fines are not what has made things getting more secure, the work done to avoid the fines is. Before the GDPR pretty much every company I looked at had absolutely terrible security, since the GDPR is in effect most companies at least stopped seeing security as a cost to be avoided, with an associated increase in awareness at the rest of the company and better processes and controls to ensure that data does not leave the servers when it isn't intended that way. It's 91 fines so far, and a whole pile of warnings and interventions, give it a few years and the cumulative effect will be substantial. Oh, and that 10K number is only the breaches that the companies are aware of and that have been reported, the real number is likely to be much higher. And without the GDPR it would be much higher still.
stordoff 8y ago
> For some context on why: consider those "cookie" notices you see on every site now. That's the 'cookie law'[1], not the GDPR. As I understand it, you don't have to provide a way to say no. You just have to notify people before doing it. [1] Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive 2002
- munchbunny 8y ago
  That's correct, if you don't collect or use that data in the first place, you don't have to ask. Keeping email addresses and placing cookies for account creation doesn't by itself require a notice, just due care in handling. It's when you want to use it for advertising or other "off label" purposes that these messages become mandatory.
- merijnv 8y ago
  > That's the 'cookie law'[1], not the GDPR. As I understand it, you don't have to provide a way to say no. You just have to notify people before doing it. Not even that, the "cookie law" is grossly misunderstood, since it already allowed things like "session cookies" and other account related settings/preferences without any sort of banner. What it banned/didn't allow (at least not without warning) is 3rd party/ad tracking cookies. Some companies just added blanket warnings "to be safe", everyone started mimicing that and now we have the insanity that is modern web publishing...
Mirioron 8y ago
>IMO, it seemed that the purpose of GDPR was to create a legal arrangement to tax/fine Google (and other big US tech companies). The fine was going to happen one way or another, the question was just how big it would be in the end. This is what I think as well. The attitude EU politicians (especially German and French) have taken against foreign tech companies is incredibly hostile. I assume they do this because we don't have many large tech companies in the EU. If they hurt foreign tech companies enough then perhaps there's a chance we might get some in the EU ourselves. What they don't understand is that the reason the EU doesn't have many major tech companies is because the environment is hostile towards them. Think back on when Zuckerberg was at the EU Parliament and he was asked to name an EU competitor to Facebook to show that they're not a monopoly.

jacquesm 8y ago

If that is what you got from the available materials and the track record of the EU DPAs to date then you should probably do some more reading. EU companies have as much or more stake in being compliant than the few US tech giants active on EU soil. I see the impact of the GDPR on EU based companies every week and it is definitely moving the needle towards more secure operations and a much better attitude towards stewardship of data-subject related data.

Mirioron 8y ago
But there are few major EU tech companies in the first place. These kinds of rules are going to hurt foreign companies because they're the major players in the market. I'm European and I barely use anything made by European tech companies in terms of final products. I'm sure there are some networking chips or similar in some of the devices I use, but the major software and hardware I use is made and designed outside of the EU. Now I would argue that the reason we don't have many major tech companies in the EU is because of a hostile environment for them here. I really can't think of many other reasons. The EU has more people than the US that are about as educated. There's at least a comparable amount of capital around, our internet connectivity is actually better, but we have very few major tech companies, even fewer ones that focus on internet stuff. Why is this important? Because if eventually we want to build automation to do other jobs then we need a lot if qualified tech workers.
- barry-cotter 8y ago
  > But there are few major EU tech companies in the first place. That’s not accurate. One ≠ a few. The only major European tech company is SAP.
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    Alphabetically: ABB, Adyen, Airbus, Alstom, ASML, BAE, Booking, Ericsson, Logitech, Philips, SAP, Siemens, Spotify, Teamviewer, TomTom. Not going to spend more than two minutes on this, by the time you do some more reading you will likely end up with 100+ companies on this list.
    - barry-cotter 8y ago
      That’s three software companies, (Booking, SAP and Spotify) one of which I mentioned, one of which is a wholly owned subsidiary of an American company. I concede on Spotify, though it is worth one tenth of SAP. I regret I was unclear, using tech instead of software. The top five most valuable companies in the world are all US software companies. The only European software company on that list is SAP. Oracle, Netflix and Salesforce also make the cut. SAP is worth 15% of Apple, 25% of Facebook, just barely less than Netflix. Alibaba and Tencent are in the global top ten. China has big tech companies like the US does. Europe does not. https://www.statista.com/statistics/263264/top-companies-in-the-world-by-market-value/#0 https://www.statista.com/statistics/263264/top-companies-in-...
      - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
        Did ARM count? China and the US have a huge single language market. The EU has a single market with tons of languages. It's much harder for a British or German startup to spread EU wide equivalent to how a US startup can achieve reach across the US and Canada. The EU single market only partially mitigates the problem. Single language seems to count much more than a single jurisdiction. The usual pattern is when someone in the EU gets interesting, they get bought by a larger US outfit. I don't think China yet allows full foreign takeovers, or a selection of their majors might now be US owned or shuttered too. The other standout in your list, Samsung, is a typical huge conglomerate - TVs, monitors, phones, cameras, memory, storage etc, and part of the larger conglomerate with fingers in everything from fridges to ship building.
ggggtez 8y ago
I don't claim to be an expert, but this random site claims that British companies have suffers 10k data breaches [0]. According to this, there have only been 91 fines. I don't see how someone can come to the conclusion that this is actually helping data be more secure. [0] https://tech.newstatesman.com/gdpr/data-breaches-gdpr https://tech.newstatesman.com/gdpr/data-breaches-gdpr
- jacquesm 8y ago
  > I don't see how someone can come to the conclusion that this is actually helping data be more secure. The fines are not what has made things getting more secure, the work done to avoid the fines is. Before the GDPR pretty much every company I looked at had absolutely terrible security, since the GDPR is in effect most companies at least stopped seeing security as a cost to be avoided, with an associated increase in awareness at the rest of the company and better processes and controls to ensure that data does not leave the servers when it isn't intended that way. It's 91 fines so far, and a whole pile of warnings and interventions, give it a few years and the cumulative effect will be substantial. Oh, and that 10K number is only the breaches that the companies are aware of and that have been reported, the real number is likely to be much higher. And without the GDPR it would be much higher still.

stordoff 8y ago

> For some context on why: consider those "cookie" notices you see on every site now. That's the 'cookie law'[1], not the GDPR. As I understand it, you don't have to provide a way to say no. You just have to notify people before doing it. [1] Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive 2002

munchbunny 8y ago
That's correct, if you don't collect or use that data in the first place, you don't have to ask. Keeping email addresses and placing cookies for account creation doesn't by itself require a notice, just due care in handling. It's when you want to use it for advertising or other "off label" purposes that these messages become mandatory.
merijnv 8y ago
> That's the 'cookie law'[1], not the GDPR. As I understand it, you don't have to provide a way to say no. You just have to notify people before doing it. Not even that, the "cookie law" is grossly misunderstood, since it already allowed things like "session cookies" and other account related settings/preferences without any sort of banner. What it banned/didn't allow (at least not without warning) is 3rd party/ad tracking cookies. Some companies just added blanket warnings "to be safe", everyone started mimicing that and now we have the insanity that is modern web publishing...

Mirioron 8y ago

>IMO, it seemed that the purpose of GDPR was to create a legal arrangement to tax/fine Google (and other big US tech companies). The fine was going to happen one way or another, the question was just how big it would be in the end. This is what I think as well. The attitude EU politicians (especially German and French) have taken against foreign tech companies is incredibly hostile. I assume they do this because we don't have many large tech companies in the EU. If they hurt foreign tech companies enough then perhaps there's a chance we might get some in the EU ourselves. What they don't understand is that the reason the EU doesn't have many major tech companies is because the environment is hostile towards them. Think back on when Zuckerberg was at the EU Parliament and he was asked to name an EU competitor to Facebook to show that they're not a monopoly.