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I hadn't read the law yet, thanks for the link, but I don't think that solves any problems at all and has potential for plenty of issues. The devil is in the de

• capableweb 5y ago
  > but I don't think that solves any problems at all and has potential for plenty of issues It does solve the problem with some businesses not offering exports in machine-readable formats in order to stop users from being able to move to other services together with their data. Or which problems do you think they are aiming to solve here? > the people already have the power to only use services that allow data exporting. Yes, but the directives are not meant to help people to chose services, it's meant to help people already using a service and being able to move to a different one with their data. By forcing companies to follow these directives, users no longer have to chose an inferior product just because they offer exports, because all the products have to offer export. > You're attempting to force companies to behave in a pro-social manner but if that company never wanted to behave in a pro-social manner we'll have just given them another attack surface with their lobbyists to use to kill their competitors. I don't really understand this line of reasoning, but I'm interested in understanding it. We already have bunch of laws and directives to make companies behave more ethical, since they made it clear that they need laws sometimes to do the right thing. How is this adding another attack vectors to kill their competitors? If company A is "anti-social" (I guess), doesn't offer an export and want to kill their competitor B (who does offer export), how does the export tie into company A being able to kill company B? As I understand it, company B is following the directives while company A isn't, so users of company A could sue that company, but that doesn't affect lawful company B. But I might misunderstand something so please, elaborate :)
  • TeMPOraL 5y ago
    > We already have bunch of laws and directives to make companies behave more ethical, since they made it clear that they need laws sometimes to do the right thing. How is this adding another attack vectors to kill their competitors? I'd go as far as saying that such regulation fixes an attack vector. Before, a company behaving pro-socially was at a competitive disadvantage - their competitors that "never wanted to behave in a pro-social manner" could adopt antisocial strategies that the pro-social company couldn't. Banning those strategies levels the playing field.
  • toolz 5y ago
    > It does solve the problem with some businesses not offering exports in machine-readable formats and which data should businesses allow users to export in machine readable formats, every click, view, views on other sites with that sites cookie/callback? what is a common machine readable format? Literally all data is machine readable - what if the "common" format is purposefully complex and hard to implement right and you have to use paid libraries to do it correctly? These are things big companies can afford to do that kill small competition. and since they are a big company simply them using it makes it "common" by some definition since more people will use it by virtue of more people using their services. > If company A is "anti-social" (I guess), doesn't offer an export and want to kill their competitor B (who does offer export), how does the export tie into company A being able to kill company B? company A, being the dominate evil-corp can pay lobbyists to define the protocol for export in a format they define....company B (the small good willed company) already exports in a format, but now they are forced to change their existing systems resulting in a lot of work lost - that is effectively money stolen from company B Now, a reasonably pro-social reaction would be to allow both exported formats, but how difficult would it be to have lobbyists convince a non-technical governing body that their format is superior and should be used? Imagine a non-technical family member is overseeing some committee and facebook shows up with their amazing analytics and awesome data export tool with graphs, charts, everything. Do you think your non-tech family member will recognize that the underlying format is bad for small businesses? I don't think I'd expect a non-techie to understand the costs there. edit: further, are there SLAs for export uptime? what happens when bad PR hits a company and data export laws effectively mean a company is expected to export terrabytes of data within a day or so? Is that small company now legally liable because they can't handle that kind of load - which is further compounded by the fact they are getting data export requests because of bad PR to begin with? Does that company now have to choose between serving exports or keeping their service running? I'm sure if I spend an hour thinking of scenarios that could hurt businesses that are otherwise doing the best they can I can come up with plenty.
• TeMPOraL 5y ago
  > The devil is in the details and the people already have the power to only use services that allow data exporting. The problem with this is that people are choosing products and services based on many different aspects simultaneously. In particular, price and (with Internet services) network effects are such a strong factors that they pretty much override all other considerations. How this plays out in practice is, the whole market stops offering value along the "irrelevant" factors. In case of GDPR - because abusing users' data makes money, and not abusing it costs money, everyone starts abusing it to reduce price (or their costs). You're not going to ditch Facebook if all your friends are there. You're not going to ditch your primary care provider because it plays fast and loose with your data - it's a big hassle, and there's no guarantee other providers aren't even worse. Imagine switching this discussion to one about food safety regulation. If they were suddenly all repealed, you can bet your top dollar that the quality of food would quickly degrade across the board. Even the most upstanding companies would start making sacrifices to keep up with their less ethical competitors, or risk getting outcompeted - relaxing standards allows to drop the price (or increase and reinvest profits), which allows to keep this up through economies of scale, while companies standing their ground on quality lose customers, lose efficiency, and have to increase the price. Customers won't choose the more increasingly more expensive, quality food, because in a typical countries, most people can't afford expensive food. The end result is the market locking into a new, much lower, food safety level. There are certain patterns on the market that are very predictable, and which are impossible to fix from within. That's where regulations are needed. And they do seem onerous to businesses when introduced - that's because we usually realize the problem only when we're deep in it.