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This kind of thing was always my biggest worry going into Brexit. The country has to reimplement a ton of regulation and you know the government and its various

This kind of thing was always my biggest worry going into Brexit. The country has to reimplement a ton of regulation and you know the government and its various hangers on won’t be able to resist “tweaking” every law and regulation to better favour them. Workers rights, human rights… it’s all up for negotiation now. By people who aren’t listening to you.

EliRivers 3y ago
When the UK was in the EU, I was protected from some of the worst excesses of the UK government. The UK didn't leave the EU to make those protections stronger...
- afavour 3y ago
  No, no, no, you’ve got it all wrong. You were subject to the tyranny of bureaucrats.
  - gpderetta 3y ago
    What have the R̶o̶m̶a̶n̶s̶ EU ever done for us?
    - moffkalast 3y ago
      The single market? What? The single market. Oh. Yeah, yeah. They did give us that. Uh, that's true. Yeah. And the peace funds. Oh, yeah, the peace funds, Reg. Remember what Northern Ireland used to be like? Yeah. All right. I'll grant you the single market and the peace funds are two things that the EU have done. And the Erasmus programme. Well, yeah. Obviously the Erasmus programme. I mean, that goes without saying, doesn't it? But apart from the peace funds, the single market, and the Erasmus programme-- Food standards. GDPR. Huh? Heh? Huh... Climate policies. Ohh... Yeah, yeah. All right. Fair enough. And the chorizo. Oh, yes. Yeah... Yeah. Yeah, that's something we'd really miss, Reg, if we left the EU. Huh. Cross-border healthcare. And it's easier to travel to Spain now, Reg. Yeah, they certainly know how to keep order. Let's face it. They're the only ones who could in a place like this. All right, but apart from the single market, GDPR, climate policies, chorizo, order, food standards, Erasmus programme, a cross-border healthcare system, and peace funds, what has the EU ever done for us? Prevented wars? Oh shut up!
      - pier25 3y ago
        Brillant!
      - nindalf 3y ago
        For those not in the know, this is from the movie Life of Brian (1979) which takes place in Roman Judea. A potential rebel tries to rile up his comrades with the rhetorical question “what have the Romans ever done for us?!” Apparently, quite a lot. https://youtu.be/Qc7HmhrgTuQ https://youtu.be/Qc7HmhrgTuQ
        dijit 3y ago
        Parody here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptfmAY6M6aA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptfmAY6M6aA
      - Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3y ago
        [flagged]
kmlx 3y ago
the regulation is a joke anyway, so why pretend? same with gdpr and the so called online privacy. it’s all smoke and mirrors with an added serving of mixed anti-americanism and european protectionism. they should remove everything from the books until these things have heft. and if they can’t come up with something serious, why legislate in the first place? just for populism’s sake? (eg UK’s online safety bill)
- wafflemaker 3y ago
  What you call a joke does work albeit slowly. Most of pages have a 'reject all' button now. It didn't get there in the first iteration, but the effect is nice now. As a bonus, you quickly see who works in bad faith, by how it's implemented.
  - Macha 3y ago
    Sadly the reject all became widespread as companies switched over to negating it by hiding "legitimate interest" toggles in multiple sublevels of expandables.
    - dijit 3y ago
      That used to work when it was just the cookie law, it doesn't work any longer. It must be "as easy" to opt in as it is to opt out, because of this dark pattern specifically.
      - Macha 3y ago
        Sure, there's the rules as written, and there's the actual behaviour of companies, and I think it's clear there's still a need for fines (and more of them) until companies start to comply and stop coming up with wishful workarounds to opt users in by default and then complain the law is unclear when they get smacked for an action that was clearly against the spirit of the law.
  - LawTalkingGuy 3y ago
    It's a joke because it demonizes a specific technology which is only tangentially related to the goal. Imagine if we wanted to make drive-by shootings illegal and rather than passing a murder law your politicians criminalized having windows in cars. Cookies are the least offensive tracking technology. They're visible to users and the interactions with them can be seen. The EU should have mandated that all tracking has to be implemented as a cookie so that users could see it and block it themselves. Instead they added a lot of cruft and legal risk to every website and it doesn't make anyone "safer". > you quickly see who works in bad faith No, and that's the ultimate fail. You click the button and feel safe but you can't see the server-side logs so it's entirely a false sense of security. If you want to stop tracking, make the law about tracking not about the current methods.
martinald 3y ago
But it's clear GDPR isn't working as intended. The compliance costs are absolutely enormous and EU member state national courts are leading to rule virtually every tech product being in noncompliance with it, as it so broad. It's likely to lead to the quasi-ban of LLMs sooner rather than later in the EU. This is going to be an enormous challenge to the EUs tech industry if UK and US firms can use LLMs but EU companies can't. While I lean remain; some people seem to have serious blind spots that a _lot_ of EU legislation is poorly thought out and given the slow pace of change extremely hard to revoke once it is in force (cf the ridiculous cookie banners; which were implemented in law in 2002 and _still_ haven't been changed, despite 10+ years of efforts to do so in the EU institutions). It's going to be even worse with the EU Digital Services Act, where being in compliance with GDPR and the DSA is a lawyers dream, as from what I understand it directly contradicts each other.
- dukeyukey 3y ago
  I did quite a bit of work implementing GDPR compliance not long before it became enforceable and it was quite easy? Basically we had to make sure we knew where data was kept and how to delete/retrieve it. The biggest piece of work was making sure our logs didn't have personal info in them (sensible anyway imo) and adding proper log rotation. Like every company will be different, but you really should know where your data is kept.
- chpatrick 3y ago
  > The compliance costs are absolutely enormous and EU member state national courts are leading to rule virtually every tech product being in noncompliance with it, as it so broad. Isn't that intended?
  - phatfish 3y ago
    Lets face it, an above average number of people commenting here work in covertly monetizing our personal data, as there seems to be quite a few of them rubbed the wrong way by the GDPR I can only conclude it's working rather well.
    - 3y ago
sharperguy 3y ago
Could have been a great opportunity to try to actually improve things rather than adding loopholes for the benefit of special interests. Maybe with the right people in power that could still be achieved, but seems unlikely.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
  I don’t know, you’re talking about a surveillance-crazy culture, I don’t see them shying away from facial recognition.
  - pjc50 3y ago
    Yeah, as with the US people will accept or even demand almost any authoritarian measure in the UK so long as it's used against people they don't like. But with some special UK pathologies.
  - captainbland 3y ago
    We love it. When we can't afford real CCTV, we hang fake cameras up practically as decorations. Asda even shows you a picture of your own face with a little green box around it to show they've got you and then allegedly just discards the data from it: https://fullfact.org/online/Asda-facial-recognition/ https://fullfact.org/online/Asda-facial-recognition/ Even when it's legally dubious we'll do our damnedest to look like we're surveilling the ** out of you.
    - SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
      While I enjoy the candor and tone to your post, the content makes me a little uneasy. It just can’t be good for society. That said, I didn’t think London was nearly as bad a Singapore for number of cameras. And their aren’t closed, I have no doubt that’s all to a central store, facial, and AI all rolling now.
      - shadowgovt 3y ago
        If anything, the UK take on surveillance was (for me as a visiting American) hugely de-stressing. In the US, I worry that some anonymous fellow citizen packing heat is going to snap and decide to execute a lifestyle change on me I didn't ask for and then melt away, unaccountable. The US unsolved murder rate is at a record high. Between the lack of firearm rights and the ubiquitous surveillance, I never had that fear in the UK.
DannyBee 3y ago
"By people who aren’t listening to you." This is the part everyone wants to say but isn't right. They are usually listening to people, just not people who agree with you :) One of the grand follies is to assume politicians are not doing what their constituents support. They almost always are, and often enjoy incredibly high local support/satisfaction ratings, even when the national ones are in the toilet. They spend significant amounts of time polling and understanding how their constituents will react to issues and votes. Now, you may want to argue those constituents are ignorant, or don't know what the vote really means, or whatever, but it's a sideshow. I often see people say "well 70% of people in the country support X so politicians aren't listening". But when you break it down, they are usually voting in alignment with constituent support, and it's just a variant of Simpson's paradox in action (overall population vs subgroups).
- anigbrowl 3y ago
  Regional constituencies allow politicians to select the voters they want in many respects. The UK might look very different if they had a party list or some other form of PR.
  - DannyBee 3y ago
    Sure, i have no doubt the system is broken in lots of ways. I'm just saying that one way in which it's not particularly broken is whether they listen. They do nothing but listen, have dedicated staffers and help that do nothing but analyze constituent opinion/views/etc. You will rarely find them doing anything that is going to go against that. The exception is the small number of places where they are forced to deal with multiple constituencies for real.
- jabradoodle 3y ago
  Well, for example, our national politicans have delayed a plan to clean our waters (that are almost all polluted to a level illegal under EU law) until 2063. They are clearly not representing the people even on non partisan issues.
nancyhn 3y ago
You may be surprised by how this plays out. UK has a golden opportunity, as Paul Graham recently wrote: I knew EU regulators would be freaking out about AI. I didn't anticipate that this freaking out would take the form of unbelievably stupid draft regulations, though in retrospect it's obvious. Regulators gonna regulate. At this point if I were a European founder planning to do an AI startup, I might just pre-emptively move elsewhere. The chance that the EU will botch regulation is just too high. Even if they noticed and corrected the error (datum: cookie warnings), it would take years. Now that I think about it, this could be a huge opportunity for the UK. If the UK avoided making the same mistakes, they could be a haven from EU AI regulations that was just a short flight away. It would be fascinating if the most important thing about Brexit, historically, turned out to be its interaction with the AI revolution. But history often surprises you like that.
- kwere 3y ago
  Uk is not a powerhouse for anything outside finance, thinking they can start up a cluster in whatever sector from the city + Oxbridge is delusional
  - dukeyukey 3y ago
    The UK has the third largest tech industry, only after the continental-scale megastates of the US and China.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
verisimi 3y ago
Right. But I don't think the EU is better! I mean, everytime I go to a new site, what cookies am I going to accept...? What ridiculous yet boring puzzle is going to try to trick me into giving this or that info over? Thanks EU!
- RedNifre 3y ago
  That's not EU, that's actually illegal under EU law. EU law requires that the "reject all" option is as easy to identify and click than the other ones.
lwhi 3y ago
Exactly. The nice thing about being part of the EU was that we had a second level of sanity involved in our jurisdiction .. especially important when we have inept dangerous parties in control.
sfe22 3y ago
The good news is UK is democracy, so no need to worry.
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  /s presumably. We're so democratic we lock up people who look like they might be going to protest against us having rulers selected by accident of birth, rulers we are forced to spend £10s of £Millions 'celebrating' despite them being some of the richest people in the World. You can't get more democratic than that! Good job everyone here has more than enough, so it's not at all immoral. /s
rsynnott 3y ago
Well, no, it doesn’t _have_ to. There’s little stopping the UK from holding onto what it has. Brexit provided an amount of political cover to remake the law if it _wanted_ to, though.

EliRivers 3y ago

When the UK was in the EU, I was protected from some of the worst excesses of the UK government. The UK didn't leave the EU to make those protections stronger...

afavour 3y ago
No, no, no, you’ve got it all wrong. You were subject to the tyranny of bureaucrats.
- gpderetta 3y ago
  What have the R̶o̶m̶a̶n̶s̶ EU ever done for us?
  - moffkalast 3y ago
    The single market? What? The single market. Oh. Yeah, yeah. They did give us that. Uh, that's true. Yeah. And the peace funds. Oh, yeah, the peace funds, Reg. Remember what Northern Ireland used to be like? Yeah. All right. I'll grant you the single market and the peace funds are two things that the EU have done. And the Erasmus programme. Well, yeah. Obviously the Erasmus programme. I mean, that goes without saying, doesn't it? But apart from the peace funds, the single market, and the Erasmus programme-- Food standards. GDPR. Huh? Heh? Huh... Climate policies. Ohh... Yeah, yeah. All right. Fair enough. And the chorizo. Oh, yes. Yeah... Yeah. Yeah, that's something we'd really miss, Reg, if we left the EU. Huh. Cross-border healthcare. And it's easier to travel to Spain now, Reg. Yeah, they certainly know how to keep order. Let's face it. They're the only ones who could in a place like this. All right, but apart from the single market, GDPR, climate policies, chorizo, order, food standards, Erasmus programme, a cross-border healthcare system, and peace funds, what has the EU ever done for us? Prevented wars? Oh shut up!
    - pier25 3y ago
      Brillant!
    - nindalf 3y ago
      For those not in the know, this is from the movie Life of Brian (1979) which takes place in Roman Judea. A potential rebel tries to rile up his comrades with the rhetorical question “what have the Romans ever done for us?!” Apparently, quite a lot. https://youtu.be/Qc7HmhrgTuQ https://youtu.be/Qc7HmhrgTuQ
      - dijit 3y ago
        Parody here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptfmAY6M6aA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptfmAY6M6aA
    - Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3y ago
      [flagged]

kmlx 3y ago

the regulation is a joke anyway, so why pretend? same with gdpr and the so called online privacy. it’s all smoke and mirrors with an added serving of mixed anti-americanism and european protectionism. they should remove everything from the books until these things have heft. and if they can’t come up with something serious, why legislate in the first place? just for populism’s sake? (eg UK’s online safety bill)

wafflemaker 3y ago
What you call a joke does work albeit slowly. Most of pages have a 'reject all' button now. It didn't get there in the first iteration, but the effect is nice now. As a bonus, you quickly see who works in bad faith, by how it's implemented.
- Macha 3y ago
  Sadly the reject all became widespread as companies switched over to negating it by hiding "legitimate interest" toggles in multiple sublevels of expandables.
  - dijit 3y ago
    That used to work when it was just the cookie law, it doesn't work any longer. It must be "as easy" to opt in as it is to opt out, because of this dark pattern specifically.
    - Macha 3y ago
      Sure, there's the rules as written, and there's the actual behaviour of companies, and I think it's clear there's still a need for fines (and more of them) until companies start to comply and stop coming up with wishful workarounds to opt users in by default and then complain the law is unclear when they get smacked for an action that was clearly against the spirit of the law.
- LawTalkingGuy 3y ago
  It's a joke because it demonizes a specific technology which is only tangentially related to the goal. Imagine if we wanted to make drive-by shootings illegal and rather than passing a murder law your politicians criminalized having windows in cars. Cookies are the least offensive tracking technology. They're visible to users and the interactions with them can be seen. The EU should have mandated that all tracking has to be implemented as a cookie so that users could see it and block it themselves. Instead they added a lot of cruft and legal risk to every website and it doesn't make anyone "safer". > you quickly see who works in bad faith No, and that's the ultimate fail. You click the button and feel safe but you can't see the server-side logs so it's entirely a false sense of security. If you want to stop tracking, make the law about tracking not about the current methods.

martinald 3y ago

But it's clear GDPR isn't working as intended. The compliance costs are absolutely enormous and EU member state national courts are leading to rule virtually every tech product being in noncompliance with it, as it so broad. It's likely to lead to the quasi-ban of LLMs sooner rather than later in the EU. This is going to be an enormous challenge to the EUs tech industry if UK and US firms can use LLMs but EU companies can't. While I lean remain; some people seem to have serious blind spots that a _lot_ of EU legislation is poorly thought out and given the slow pace of change extremely hard to revoke once it is in force (cf the ridiculous cookie banners; which were implemented in law in 2002 and _still_ haven't been changed, despite 10+ years of efforts to do so in the EU institutions). It's going to be even worse with the EU Digital Services Act, where being in compliance with GDPR and the DSA is a lawyers dream, as from what I understand it directly contradicts each other.

dukeyukey 3y ago
I did quite a bit of work implementing GDPR compliance not long before it became enforceable and it was quite easy? Basically we had to make sure we knew where data was kept and how to delete/retrieve it. The biggest piece of work was making sure our logs didn't have personal info in them (sensible anyway imo) and adding proper log rotation. Like every company will be different, but you really should know where your data is kept.
chpatrick 3y ago
> The compliance costs are absolutely enormous and EU member state national courts are leading to rule virtually every tech product being in noncompliance with it, as it so broad. Isn't that intended?
- phatfish 3y ago
  Lets face it, an above average number of people commenting here work in covertly monetizing our personal data, as there seems to be quite a few of them rubbed the wrong way by the GDPR I can only conclude it's working rather well.
  - 3y ago

sharperguy 3y ago

Could have been a great opportunity to try to actually improve things rather than adding loopholes for the benefit of special interests. Maybe with the right people in power that could still be achieved, but seems unlikely.

SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
I don’t know, you’re talking about a surveillance-crazy culture, I don’t see them shying away from facial recognition.
- pjc50 3y ago
  Yeah, as with the US people will accept or even demand almost any authoritarian measure in the UK so long as it's used against people they don't like. But with some special UK pathologies.
- captainbland 3y ago
  We love it. When we can't afford real CCTV, we hang fake cameras up practically as decorations. Asda even shows you a picture of your own face with a little green box around it to show they've got you and then allegedly just discards the data from it: https://fullfact.org/online/Asda-facial-recognition/ https://fullfact.org/online/Asda-facial-recognition/ Even when it's legally dubious we'll do our damnedest to look like we're surveilling the ** out of you.
  - SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
    While I enjoy the candor and tone to your post, the content makes me a little uneasy. It just can’t be good for society. That said, I didn’t think London was nearly as bad a Singapore for number of cameras. And their aren’t closed, I have no doubt that’s all to a central store, facial, and AI all rolling now.
    - shadowgovt 3y ago
      If anything, the UK take on surveillance was (for me as a visiting American) hugely de-stressing. In the US, I worry that some anonymous fellow citizen packing heat is going to snap and decide to execute a lifestyle change on me I didn't ask for and then melt away, unaccountable. The US unsolved murder rate is at a record high. Between the lack of firearm rights and the ubiquitous surveillance, I never had that fear in the UK.

DannyBee 3y ago

"By people who aren’t listening to you." This is the part everyone wants to say but isn't right. They are usually listening to people, just not people who agree with you :) One of the grand follies is to assume politicians are not doing what their constituents support. They almost always are, and often enjoy incredibly high local support/satisfaction ratings, even when the national ones are in the toilet. They spend significant amounts of time polling and understanding how their constituents will react to issues and votes. Now, you may want to argue those constituents are ignorant, or don't know what the vote really means, or whatever, but it's a sideshow. I often see people say "well 70% of people in the country support X so politicians aren't listening". But when you break it down, they are usually voting in alignment with constituent support, and it's just a variant of Simpson's paradox in action (overall population vs subgroups).

anigbrowl 3y ago
Regional constituencies allow politicians to select the voters they want in many respects. The UK might look very different if they had a party list or some other form of PR.
- DannyBee 3y ago
  Sure, i have no doubt the system is broken in lots of ways. I'm just saying that one way in which it's not particularly broken is whether they listen. They do nothing but listen, have dedicated staffers and help that do nothing but analyze constituent opinion/views/etc. You will rarely find them doing anything that is going to go against that. The exception is the small number of places where they are forced to deal with multiple constituencies for real.
jabradoodle 3y ago
Well, for example, our national politicans have delayed a plan to clean our waters (that are almost all polluted to a level illegal under EU law) until 2063. They are clearly not representing the people even on non partisan issues.

nancyhn 3y ago

You may be surprised by how this plays out. UK has a golden opportunity, as Paul Graham recently wrote: I knew EU regulators would be freaking out about AI. I didn't anticipate that this freaking out would take the form of unbelievably stupid draft regulations, though in retrospect it's obvious. Regulators gonna regulate. At this point if I were a European founder planning to do an AI startup, I might just pre-emptively move elsewhere. The chance that the EU will botch regulation is just too high. Even if they noticed and corrected the error (datum: cookie warnings), it would take years. Now that I think about it, this could be a huge opportunity for the UK. If the UK avoided making the same mistakes, they could be a haven from EU AI regulations that was just a short flight away. It would be fascinating if the most important thing about Brexit, historically, turned out to be its interaction with the AI revolution. But history often surprises you like that.

kwere 3y ago
Uk is not a powerhouse for anything outside finance, thinking they can start up a cluster in whatever sector from the city + Oxbridge is delusional
- dukeyukey 3y ago
  The UK has the third largest tech industry, only after the continental-scale megastates of the US and China.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

verisimi 3y ago

Right. But I don't think the EU is better! I mean, everytime I go to a new site, what cookies am I going to accept...? What ridiculous yet boring puzzle is going to try to trick me into giving this or that info over? Thanks EU!

RedNifre 3y ago
That's not EU, that's actually illegal under EU law. EU law requires that the "reject all" option is as easy to identify and click than the other ones.

lwhi 3y ago

Exactly. The nice thing about being part of the EU was that we had a second level of sanity involved in our jurisdiction .. especially important when we have inept dangerous parties in control.

sfe22 3y ago

The good news is UK is democracy, so no need to worry.

pbhjpbhj 3y ago
/s presumably. We're so democratic we lock up people who look like they might be going to protest against us having rulers selected by accident of birth, rulers we are forced to spend £10s of £Millions 'celebrating' despite them being some of the richest people in the World. You can't get more democratic than that! Good job everyone here has more than enough, so it's not at all immoral. /s

rsynnott 3y ago

Well, no, it doesn’t _have_ to. There’s little stopping the UK from holding onto what it has. Brexit provided an amount of political cover to remake the law if it _wanted_ to, though.