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Most criticism of GDPR on HN is a criticism of bad-faith attempts to pretend to comply, many of which are expressly forbidden by the GDPR. It's a well-written,

Most criticism of GDPR on HN is a criticism of bad-faith attempts to pretend to comply, many of which are expressly forbidden by the GDPR. It's a well-written, plain English regulation, and I encourage everyone to read it before criticising it. (At the very least, point to the bits of the regulation you disagree with: it should only take around 5 minutes to look up.)

dijit 11mo ago
Hear hear. My company had consultants come in to help with GDPR, I left after months of them being hired: more confused than I went in. So I went to the source, and I found it surprisingly easy to read and quite clear. I think theres a lot of bad faith discussion about the GDPR being complex by people who have a financial interest in people disliking it (or, parroting what someone else said). Heres the full text: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:32016R0679 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE... 87 pages and nearly every edge case is carved out. Takes 20 minutes to read.
- vanviegen 11mo ago
  > 87 pages and nearly every edge case is carved out. Takes 20 minutes to read. That's some serious speed reading! :-)
- xienze 11mo ago
  20 minutes to “read” 87 dense pages of legalese? Perhaps you meant to say “skim over.”
  - dpark 11mo ago
    Perhaps they meant 200 minutes. Or perhaps they also never read the law they are chiding others for not reading.
    - dijit 11mo ago
      Try reading it, it's like 10 sentences per page and plain language.
      - dpark 11mo ago
        What is the point of lying about this? Anyone can open up the PDF and see this is an untrue statement. The text is 56k words, novella length but dry and tedious. This is hours of reading. I’m not saying it’s unreasonable to read this document if your work involves GDPR compliance. But this is not a quick or easy read.
        dijit 11mo ago
        Maybe I have an advantage because I am natively english and learned to read at a young age, idk. I’m not lying, why would I provide the source if I was?
        dpark 11mo ago
        It is an outright lie that there are “10 sentences per page”. You can open the PDF and see that this is not even a little bit correct. 10 sentences per page would maybe be appropriate for an Early Reader book. It’s certainly not we have here. You also didn’t read 56k words in 20 minutes. This is nonsense, at 46 words per second.
        dijit 11mo ago
        Maybe “statements” is better than “sentences”, but I meant what I meant.. and yes it took 20 minutes, it’s not the dense legalese you’re implying. it’s just not. unless the dense one here is not the text. https://imgur.com/D19T8zD https://imgur.com/D19T8zD
        dpark 11mo ago
        I could suspend my disbelief for a moment and imagine that you are capable of reading 46 words per second. Sure. You happen to read about 10x faster than the average person at 250-300 words per minute. Congrats. What I cannot believe is that you would in any way imagine that this is normal. Speed readers know that they read faster than other people and do not casually assume others could read The Hobbit in 34 minutes. So no, I don’t actually believe you read this in 20 minutes, at >4 pages per minute, >46 words per second, and 10x faster than an average reader. Generously I would say you perhaps skimmed the doc in that time. On the off chance that this is true, again congrats. You should know for the future that your experience reading does not map to the typical person who literally reads about 10x slower than you.
  - wizzwizz4 11mo ago
    GDPR is not dense legalese. Start on page 33, read the first 3 chapters and then until bored, start again from page 1 until you reach 33 again, and then read from where you left off: it'll make perfect sense.
- LtWorf 11mo ago
  > My company had consultants come in to help with GDPR, I left after months of them being hired: more confused than I went in. Normally one tries to hire lawyers that have read the law and formed an opinion already…
pembrook 11mo ago
I would call this the religious zeal response, it's been parroted so many times here that it's become fact, even though this is false. The full text of GDPR is 261 pages long with 99 articles and 173 recitals. Here's a condensed version and guide to reading the actual passages that matter, still 88 pages long: https://www.enterpriseready.io/gdpr/how-to-read-gdpr/#:~:text=The%20first%20thing%20you'll,88%20pages%20of%20GDPR%20text. https://www.enterpriseready.io/gdpr/how-to-read-gdpr/#:~:tex... And even if it was, being easy to read is not necessarily good when it comes to regulation, because this means there is a WIDE berth for interpretation by court cases and judges. This becomes a shifting target that makes compliance impossible. For example, you could write a one sentence net-zero law that says "All economic activity in the EU must be net zero by tomorrow." However, what constitutes economic activty? Is heating my home in the winter economic activity? What if I work from home? What about feeding my children food? What about suppliers and parts from outside the EU? Finished goods vs. raw materials? How will we audit the supply chains on each globally? Who will enforce those audits and how detailed do they need to be? Etc. etc. To these questions, the religious green fanatics on EcoHackerNews will simply reply: it's actually super easy to comply, you can read it yourself, it's one sentence!
- array_key_first 11mo ago
  Right, but there's also the competing religious zealots who are ideologically opposed to regulation... like as a concept. What you need to realize is that of course companies hate regulations. Every company, anywhere on Earth, will tell you regulation X is bad. All of them. They will do everything they can possibly do to not have the regulation. When slavery was outlawed in the US, you can bet your ass that every single bad-faith recreation of slavery was tried. Many of them highly successful, and some taking over 100 years (yes, really!) to be fixed. What that means is that, just because a company puts up a cookie banner, or says "this law sucks", doesn't mean you should take that to heart. Of course, to them, it sucks, and it's too complicated, and it's all legalese, and la dee da. They would prefer to hire children, okay? And we know that, for a fact, because they did. So just, grain of salt. Doesn't mean the law is good either, but just know these are the adversarial forces here.
  - 11mo ago

dijit 11mo ago

Hear hear. My company had consultants come in to help with GDPR, I left after months of them being hired: more confused than I went in. So I went to the source, and I found it surprisingly easy to read and quite clear. I think theres a lot of bad faith discussion about the GDPR being complex by people who have a financial interest in people disliking it (or, parroting what someone else said). Heres the full text: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:32016R0679 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE... 87 pages and nearly every edge case is carved out. Takes 20 minutes to read.

vanviegen 11mo ago
> 87 pages and nearly every edge case is carved out. Takes 20 minutes to read. That's some serious speed reading! :-)
xienze 11mo ago
20 minutes to “read” 87 dense pages of legalese? Perhaps you meant to say “skim over.”
- dpark 11mo ago
  Perhaps they meant 200 minutes. Or perhaps they also never read the law they are chiding others for not reading.
  - dijit 11mo ago
    Try reading it, it's like 10 sentences per page and plain language.
    - dpark 11mo ago
      What is the point of lying about this? Anyone can open up the PDF and see this is an untrue statement. The text is 56k words, novella length but dry and tedious. This is hours of reading. I’m not saying it’s unreasonable to read this document if your work involves GDPR compliance. But this is not a quick or easy read.
      - dijit 11mo ago
        Maybe I have an advantage because I am natively english and learned to read at a young age, idk. I’m not lying, why would I provide the source if I was?
        dpark 11mo ago
        It is an outright lie that there are “10 sentences per page”. You can open the PDF and see that this is not even a little bit correct. 10 sentences per page would maybe be appropriate for an Early Reader book. It’s certainly not we have here. You also didn’t read 56k words in 20 minutes. This is nonsense, at 46 words per second.
        dijit 11mo ago
        Maybe “statements” is better than “sentences”, but I meant what I meant.. and yes it took 20 minutes, it’s not the dense legalese you’re implying. it’s just not. unless the dense one here is not the text. https://imgur.com/D19T8zD https://imgur.com/D19T8zD
        dpark 11mo ago
        I could suspend my disbelief for a moment and imagine that you are capable of reading 46 words per second. Sure. You happen to read about 10x faster than the average person at 250-300 words per minute. Congrats. What I cannot believe is that you would in any way imagine that this is normal. Speed readers know that they read faster than other people and do not casually assume others could read The Hobbit in 34 minutes. So no, I don’t actually believe you read this in 20 minutes, at >4 pages per minute, >46 words per second, and 10x faster than an average reader. Generously I would say you perhaps skimmed the doc in that time. On the off chance that this is true, again congrats. You should know for the future that your experience reading does not map to the typical person who literally reads about 10x slower than you.
- wizzwizz4 11mo ago
  GDPR is not dense legalese. Start on page 33, read the first 3 chapters and then until bored, start again from page 1 until you reach 33 again, and then read from where you left off: it'll make perfect sense.
LtWorf 11mo ago
> My company had consultants come in to help with GDPR, I left after months of them being hired: more confused than I went in. Normally one tries to hire lawyers that have read the law and formed an opinion already…

pembrook 11mo ago

I would call this the religious zeal response, it's been parroted so many times here that it's become fact, even though this is false. The full text of GDPR is 261 pages long with 99 articles and 173 recitals. Here's a condensed version and guide to reading the actual passages that matter, still 88 pages long: https://www.enterpriseready.io/gdpr/how-to-read-gdpr/#:~:text=The%20first%20thing%20you'll,88%20pages%20of%20GDPR%20text. https://www.enterpriseready.io/gdpr/how-to-read-gdpr/#:~:tex... And even if it was, being easy to read is not necessarily good when it comes to regulation, because this means there is a WIDE berth for interpretation by court cases and judges. This becomes a shifting target that makes compliance impossible. For example, you could write a one sentence net-zero law that says "All economic activity in the EU must be net zero by tomorrow." However, what constitutes economic activty? Is heating my home in the winter economic activity? What if I work from home? What about feeding my children food? What about suppliers and parts from outside the EU? Finished goods vs. raw materials? How will we audit the supply chains on each globally? Who will enforce those audits and how detailed do they need to be? Etc. etc. To these questions, the religious green fanatics on EcoHackerNews will simply reply: it's actually super easy to comply, you can read it yourself, it's one sentence!

array_key_first 11mo ago
Right, but there's also the competing religious zealots who are ideologically opposed to regulation... like as a concept. What you need to realize is that of course companies hate regulations. Every company, anywhere on Earth, will tell you regulation X is bad. All of them. They will do everything they can possibly do to not have the regulation. When slavery was outlawed in the US, you can bet your ass that every single bad-faith recreation of slavery was tried. Many of them highly successful, and some taking over 100 years (yes, really!) to be fixed. What that means is that, just because a company puts up a cookie banner, or says "this law sucks", doesn't mean you should take that to heart. Of course, to them, it sucks, and it's too complicated, and it's all legalese, and la dee da. They would prefer to hire children, okay? And we know that, for a fact, because they did. So just, grain of salt. Doesn't mean the law is good either, but just know these are the adversarial forces here.
- 11mo ago