Out of curiosity, what exactly would you define as "collecting data"? There has been much debate over what that particular term encompasses. Clearly, if a websi

Out of curiosity, what exactly would you define as "collecting data"? There has been much debate over what that particular term encompasses. Clearly, if a website sells users' browsing data to third parties so they can build an ad profile, they would be collecting data in your sense. But on the other end, if a forum site stores the contents of its users' posts to display them to other users, then it's considered business as usual. So what exact actions make up "collecting data"? Is it how long the data is stored? How the data is obtained from the users? Whether the users are aware that it is stored? What kind of data is stored? How the data is used by the website? Whether the data is transmitted to third parties? Some combination of all of these? People both on this site and elsewhere have come up with different answers to all of these questions, and we need to nail it down if we want to have effective regulations.