11 ms·

The EU is currently the only territory that is even trying to make the internet less dystopian

by Bakary 4y ago

hunterb123 4y ago
No they just made it peppered with useless popups. They regulate it without innovating it.
- happymellon 4y ago
  The Americans peppered it with useless pop-ups because they want to try and make people think that regulations empowering users is annoying. Just look at the amount of Americans that think that they have to request permission to use cookies. Disinformation is a powerful tool.
  - wruza 4y ago
    I bet on legal safeguards, not on conspiracy. Because for most companies a chance of a lawsuit is a chance of instant bankruptcy.
- imiric 4y ago
  Is there a better effort done elsewhere? Governments have always lagged to regulate corporations, either because of conflicts of interest or plain incompetence, which is especially true for Big Tech. But at least the EU is trying to some extent, which was GP's point. > No they just made it peppered with useless popups. The popups were a workaround the web adopted due to the lack of technical details in the law, but the law itself isn't to blame. There have been many fines handed out, which is a step in the right direction, at the very least. We should celebrate any step towards protecting citizens from corporations, not scoff that it's not perfect.
  - happymellon 4y ago
    The lack of technical details was a good one. The pop ups was the solution the industry chose. They could have gone with the do not track header, but they didn't although they still could and it would be okay within the concept of the law which just requires consent for tracking.
    - imiric 4y ago
      I agree, and nearly everyone on this forum could come up with a better technical solution. I'm not familiar with how the GDPR came to be, but presumably they had technical advisors, and still took this approach. Maybe it was due to corporate pressure, maybe incompetence; we can only speculate at this point. I'm hopeful that the laws will keep evolving in response to citizen needs, but I'm still glad I have some control over the data companies have on me, however limited that may be.
- MaKey 4y ago
  Those useless popups are there because websites still want to track their users. They aren't needed if only technically necessary cookies are used.
jaywalk 4y ago
Citation needed.
- m-p-3 4y ago
  Not OP, but I'd say GDPR is a step in the right direction for the average consumer.
  - godelski 4y ago
    GDPR is a small step in the right direction but there have also been major steps backwards, especially with respect to encryption. They talk consumer privacy on one hand but discuss how to remove protective tools with the other. I'm not saying it is better anywhere else, but that we can't just say "oh GDPR is here, everything is alright."
    - Brian_K_White 4y ago
      But we can say without any qualifiers that complaining about popups and blaming them on GDPR is stupid and misinformed.
      - godelski 4y ago
        I understand why people point to GDPR but I agree that it is misguided. Mostly Americans see the dark patterns (when I use a European VPN the experience is generally smoother). The much larger share of the blame is on the companies, the ones who got us into this mess in the first place. And there are egregious examples like StackOverflow which just have no excuse.
simonsarris 4y ago
The EU's biggest contribution to the internet in the last 10 years was forcing every site to add a popup, ruining UX while desensitizing the world, where it was transparent to everyone in the industry that if they wanted to do something they should have targeted browser vendors and not websites.
- rtsil 4y ago
  The EU's biggest contribution is the power it gave me, a simple citizen, to force* billion-dollar companies to not share and even delete my personal data if I want to, without a complicated procedure. *And I mean force, not request.
  - splatcollision 4y ago
    Wait, can I use this to have HN delete my account? If so moving to Europe BRB
    - CuriousCosmic 4y ago
      Check the FAQ. You can just email HN's address (in the FAQ under "can i delete my account") and they'll take care of it.
      - phpthrowaway99 4y ago
        First off, thats not really in the spirit of account deletion in my opinion. Because you're making me pinpoint myself to another person that I want it deleted. Maybe I don't want a human browsing my stuff reading it wondering why I'm asking for it to be deleted. Even less privacy in my opinion. But beyond that, it won't delete your messages. I guess they just own my words forever now.
        kelnos 4y ago
        > Because you're making me pinpoint myself to another person that I want it deleted. Maybe I don't want a human browsing my stuff reading it wondering why I'm asking for it to be deleted. That's a pretty weird objection. Even if there was a button at the bottom of your profile page that you could push to delete your account, there's nothing stopping that button from notifying some real person behind HN who could peruse your posting history before deletion. > Even less privacy in my opinion. What "privacy" are you talking about? You've posted these comments to a public website, where any user can view your entire comment history. > But beyond that, it won't delete your messages. I guess they just own my words forever now. I haven't read HN's terms of use or privacy policy (I suspect you haven't either? Ironic, considering the tone of your post), but presumably, as a condition of signing up in the first place, you've elected to allow that practice. As a fellow HN user, I think it would be really bad for the community if random bits of old discussions just disappeared, making it difficult or impossible to understand the conversation that was going on at the time. I certainly think there should be exceptions; say you accidentally (or regretfully) posted some personal information that should be deleted... I believe in that case the HN mods would do you a solid and delete it. And I know that in some (all?) cases of account deletion, they'll make up a new username to attribute your posts to, which would dilute any association the posts have with you (assuming you used a name that you've used in other places). Regardless, there's nothing stopping someone from scraping HN (or using the HN API) to mirror the content of discussions elsewhere. And they might not be in a jurisdiction where you can expect to get your data deleted if you really want to. To me, these privacy/deletion laws are most useful to force a corporation to delete any data it has on you that it holds privately, and could use to identify you or monetize you or whatever. Once user-generated content comes into play, it feels like a different beast to me.
echelon 4y ago
The GDPR is mostly good [1], but the EU is trying to ban porn and censor the web, which is wholeheartedly worse than the good that they've done. We should care about our privacy, but we should care an order of magnitude more about our liberty. One does no good without the other. [1] In its current form, the GDPR massively helps entrench existing incumbents. Compliance is technically difficult and costly and can be difficult for new players just getting started. There should be more assistance given to startups and small companies, and pieces such as the right to access and export data should only apply to companies of 10 employees and larger (or some revenue threshold). These are costly and difficult to implement, and I know my startup is not in compliance. It would take a month just to build that functionality.
- OkayPhysicist 4y ago
  "Compliance is hard" when it comes to the GDPR is patently false. Don't gather data you don't need, and don't track things you don't need, don't share personally identifying data, and don't retain data you no longer need. All those things are the default. It is hard to run into a situation where you risk violating the GDPR without actively making a decision to do so, with maybe the exception of the whole "users have a right to all their information/delete all their information" thing, which should be a straight-forward database operation unless you're doing something asinine.
  - echelon 4y ago
    So you get no user accounts, then. The minute you have user accounts, you have to export everything associated with EU residents that invoke data export rights. Every table with a user foreign key. This is a big scope. Every upvote. Every comment. Every file upload. Even on your innocuous personal blog. Not sure if it's in scope? Hire a lawyer. Any product imaginable quickly becomes a big GDPR data export problem and legal headache. This is clearly a burden to small teams.
    - OkayPhysicist 4y ago
      If running an SQL query is too large a burden for you to bear, then you'd have already crumpled at the first bug in your codebase.

The EU is currently the only territory that is even trying to make the internet less dystopian

by Bakary 4y ago

The EU is currently the only territory that is even trying to make the internet less dystopian

hunterb123 4y ago

No they just made it peppered with useless popups. They regulate it without innovating it.

happymellon 4y ago
The Americans peppered it with useless pop-ups because they want to try and make people think that regulations empowering users is annoying. Just look at the amount of Americans that think that they have to request permission to use cookies. Disinformation is a powerful tool.
- wruza 4y ago
  I bet on legal safeguards, not on conspiracy. Because for most companies a chance of a lawsuit is a chance of instant bankruptcy.
imiric 4y ago
Is there a better effort done elsewhere? Governments have always lagged to regulate corporations, either because of conflicts of interest or plain incompetence, which is especially true for Big Tech. But at least the EU is trying to some extent, which was GP's point. > No they just made it peppered with useless popups. The popups were a workaround the web adopted due to the lack of technical details in the law, but the law itself isn't to blame. There have been many fines handed out, which is a step in the right direction, at the very least. We should celebrate any step towards protecting citizens from corporations, not scoff that it's not perfect.
- happymellon 4y ago
  The lack of technical details was a good one. The pop ups was the solution the industry chose. They could have gone with the do not track header, but they didn't although they still could and it would be okay within the concept of the law which just requires consent for tracking.
  - imiric 4y ago
    I agree, and nearly everyone on this forum could come up with a better technical solution. I'm not familiar with how the GDPR came to be, but presumably they had technical advisors, and still took this approach. Maybe it was due to corporate pressure, maybe incompetence; we can only speculate at this point. I'm hopeful that the laws will keep evolving in response to citizen needs, but I'm still glad I have some control over the data companies have on me, however limited that may be.
MaKey 4y ago
Those useless popups are there because websites still want to track their users. They aren't needed if only technically necessary cookies are used.

jaywalk 4y ago

Citation needed.

m-p-3 4y ago
Not OP, but I'd say GDPR is a step in the right direction for the average consumer.
- godelski 4y ago
  GDPR is a small step in the right direction but there have also been major steps backwards, especially with respect to encryption. They talk consumer privacy on one hand but discuss how to remove protective tools with the other. I'm not saying it is better anywhere else, but that we can't just say "oh GDPR is here, everything is alright."
  - Brian_K_White 4y ago
    But we can say without any qualifiers that complaining about popups and blaming them on GDPR is stupid and misinformed.
    - godelski 4y ago
      I understand why people point to GDPR but I agree that it is misguided. Mostly Americans see the dark patterns (when I use a European VPN the experience is generally smoother). The much larger share of the blame is on the companies, the ones who got us into this mess in the first place. And there are egregious examples like StackOverflow which just have no excuse.

simonsarris 4y ago

The EU's biggest contribution to the internet in the last 10 years was forcing every site to add a popup, ruining UX while desensitizing the world, where it was transparent to everyone in the industry that if they wanted to do something they should have targeted browser vendors and not websites.

rtsil 4y ago
The EU's biggest contribution is the power it gave me, a simple citizen, to force* billion-dollar companies to not share and even delete my personal data if I want to, without a complicated procedure. *And I mean force, not request.
- splatcollision 4y ago
  Wait, can I use this to have HN delete my account? If so moving to Europe BRB
  - CuriousCosmic 4y ago
    Check the FAQ. You can just email HN's address (in the FAQ under "can i delete my account") and they'll take care of it.
    - phpthrowaway99 4y ago
      First off, thats not really in the spirit of account deletion in my opinion. Because you're making me pinpoint myself to another person that I want it deleted. Maybe I don't want a human browsing my stuff reading it wondering why I'm asking for it to be deleted. Even less privacy in my opinion. But beyond that, it won't delete your messages. I guess they just own my words forever now.
      - kelnos 4y ago
        > Because you're making me pinpoint myself to another person that I want it deleted. Maybe I don't want a human browsing my stuff reading it wondering why I'm asking for it to be deleted. That's a pretty weird objection. Even if there was a button at the bottom of your profile page that you could push to delete your account, there's nothing stopping that button from notifying some real person behind HN who could peruse your posting history before deletion. > Even less privacy in my opinion. What "privacy" are you talking about? You've posted these comments to a public website, where any user can view your entire comment history. > But beyond that, it won't delete your messages. I guess they just own my words forever now. I haven't read HN's terms of use or privacy policy (I suspect you haven't either? Ironic, considering the tone of your post), but presumably, as a condition of signing up in the first place, you've elected to allow that practice. As a fellow HN user, I think it would be really bad for the community if random bits of old discussions just disappeared, making it difficult or impossible to understand the conversation that was going on at the time. I certainly think there should be exceptions; say you accidentally (or regretfully) posted some personal information that should be deleted... I believe in that case the HN mods would do you a solid and delete it. And I know that in some (all?) cases of account deletion, they'll make up a new username to attribute your posts to, which would dilute any association the posts have with you (assuming you used a name that you've used in other places). Regardless, there's nothing stopping someone from scraping HN (or using the HN API) to mirror the content of discussions elsewhere. And they might not be in a jurisdiction where you can expect to get your data deleted if you really want to. To me, these privacy/deletion laws are most useful to force a corporation to delete any data it has on you that it holds privately, and could use to identify you or monetize you or whatever. Once user-generated content comes into play, it feels like a different beast to me.

echelon 4y ago

The GDPR is mostly good [1], but the EU is trying to ban porn and censor the web, which is wholeheartedly worse than the good that they've done. We should care about our privacy, but we should care an order of magnitude more about our liberty. One does no good without the other. [1] In its current form, the GDPR massively helps entrench existing incumbents. Compliance is technically difficult and costly and can be difficult for new players just getting started. There should be more assistance given to startups and small companies, and pieces such as the right to access and export data should only apply to companies of 10 employees and larger (or some revenue threshold). These are costly and difficult to implement, and I know my startup is not in compliance. It would take a month just to build that functionality.

OkayPhysicist 4y ago
"Compliance is hard" when it comes to the GDPR is patently false. Don't gather data you don't need, and don't track things you don't need, don't share personally identifying data, and don't retain data you no longer need. All those things are the default. It is hard to run into a situation where you risk violating the GDPR without actively making a decision to do so, with maybe the exception of the whole "users have a right to all their information/delete all their information" thing, which should be a straight-forward database operation unless you're doing something asinine.
- echelon 4y ago
  So you get no user accounts, then. The minute you have user accounts, you have to export everything associated with EU residents that invoke data export rights. Every table with a user foreign key. This is a big scope. Every upvote. Every comment. Every file upload. Even on your innocuous personal blog. Not sure if it's in scope? Hire a lawyer. Any product imaginable quickly becomes a big GDPR data export problem and legal headache. This is clearly a burden to small teams.
  - OkayPhysicist 4y ago
    If running an SQL query is too large a burden for you to bear, then you'd have already crumpled at the first bug in your codebase.