Hacker News Reader

Comment by meredydd | Hacker News Reader

Data protection rules are this century's equivalent of pollution regulation. The online ecosystem has trashed the global commons with huge amounts of everyone's personal data, with no meaningful control or consent to how it is used, and now it needs to be cleaned up.

There are companies that will go out of business, or have to pivot heavily, as a result of GDPR. If this doesn't happen, it's is not doing its job.

More mainstream companies will grumble about this, just like they do about environmental regulations now. But, then as now, we've done the experiment. As an industry, we were left to self-regulate for 2.5 decades, and look what we did.

I am not looking forward to finishing our GDPR compliance. Anvil doesn't rely on personal data for its business model, so it's not a big deal, just a bit tedious - it's a textbook frictional loss from regulation. But I am looking forward to living in a world where everyone has to comply.

View on HN

There is a third option beyond go bankrupt or pivot, as this story shows very clearly - cease trading with the EU or citizens of its member states entirely. Like the effect of FATCA but in reverse.

That's the decision this small training firm has taken. It's a loss of 5% of revenue, they say. That's not bankruptcy or pivoting.

This seems to be the unsurprising outcome of the EU's modern "obey us or we crush you" mentality. The UK is walking away. This small company is walking away. Apparently Microsoft is at least thinking about it for some products (the connect site is back now but looks semi abandoned). How many others will look at this and conclude the risks are too high to justify the costs?

GDPR does not seem like a well thought out law. I have always been satisfied with my ability to delete things from the cloud. If I end up being banned from useful services because the costs of complying with the EU's very transparent attempts to bulk up their budget by repeatedly fining tech firms, I will not be happy.

>> This seems to be the unsurprising outcome of the EU's modern "obey us or we crush you" mentality. The UK is walking away.

When did the EU try to crush the UK?

And is the UK really walking away because it doesn't like EU trading regulations? I thought they're trying their damnedest to continue benefiting from those regulations.

Things said by various EU/French/German/British officials at various times about leaving the EU:

Leaving the EU is suicide.

It's self harm.

There must be a threat, there must be a risk, there must be a price for leaving (Hollande)

"Welcome to hell", said to the UK's negotiator on reaching the negotiation table.

"Brexit itself is already punishment enough" (Tusk)

Voting to leave will destroy 500,000-800,000 jobs due to "uncertainty" over how the EU will react (this claimed turned out to be false in the end).

The UK financial industry will be forced by the EU to move tens of thousands of people/jobs to the EU. Also all flights will be grounded. This is the "price" of leaving.

It is fair to say that in general everything said and done by the EU is designed to cause maximum damage, always with the caveat that continued automatic obedience to EU law and courts will make the "pain" go away (as they put it).

And is the UK really walking away because it doesn't like EU trading regulations? I thought they're trying their damnedest to continue benefiting from those regulations

The primary "benefit" of complying with those regulations is the EU does not impose bans on your products. The regulations themselves are often badly thought out - that's what this whole thread is about, badly thought out GDPR regulations causing US businesses to give up trying to sell to the EU (effectively the EU has created massive new trade barriers with the rest of the world).

>> The primary "benefit" of complying with those regulations is the EU does not impose bans on your products.

The EU is not banning any products from the UK. The benefit that the UK gets is is tarriff-free access to the common market. Any trade, with anyone is subject to tarriffs, so that's a real benefit- unlike any imagined harm coming from "bans" that never happened.

Well this is getting a bit off topic but that is not correct. The EU has been quite clear that it will ban people and companies in its jurisdiction from buying financial products from the UK: not impose tariffs but rather implement outright bans. And they are not willing to negotiate on that point. It is seen as a necessary 'punishment'.

They are also talking about banning member state citizens from buying tickets from British airlines in situations where they currently can. And possibly banning all flights from the UK to the EU. Again, bans, not tariffs.

Lastly, I note that the effect of GDPR is that effectively "Europeans" are now banned from buying training products from this US training firm. It's not technically a government ban, it's more like major encouragement to the outside world to implement their own private sector bans, but the end result is identical: you cannot buy at any price.

Like the trade ban you mentioned above, any other sort of ban, such as banning the buying of financial products from the UK, or banning flights from the UK to the EU is pure fantasy.

What is really the case is that Brexit risks causing British financial instutitions to lose their financial passporting rights, that allow them to trade in the EU.

As to flights, the risk here is that, without other international flight agreements for some UK companies (such as Ryanair and EasyJet) other than EU agreements, such companies risk losing the right to fly outside of Europe, or within the EU.

Both of the above are the result of international agreements being rendered invalid because of Brexit, and not some sort of punishment that the EU decided to bestow upon the UK.

Obviously EU competitors will step in immediately and eat the UK's lunch, wherever they find the opportunity. But I don't know what else anyone could expect. I understand the British are great believers in a free market, after all.

Indeed, as far as the UK is concerned, the market after Brexit is going to be almost completely unregulated.

"When did the EU try to crush the UK?"

Loss of sovereignty as it pertains to 'migrant quotas'. A country should be able to say - 'no, we have decided to not receive these migrants. These people need to go from where they came'.

Someone will have to provide links on whether migrant quotas were part of the original agreement in the formation of the EU. So if Britain decides its more important to retain their ability to make this decision vs. remaining in the EU, that's a decision Britain can make. And they did.

The African Union/OPEC (probably the only actual authority with any economic leverage in the ME) should designate areas where refuges can be returned.

Morality aside, might/power defines reality in this world. The reality is that the US stirred the pot in the ME, and the EU suffers because of it. In the absence of war crime charges/damages brought before the ITC, this is the only recourse that is within Britain's best interest, based on the election they held.

  >> Loss of sovereignty as it pertains to 'migrant quotas'. A country should be
  >> able to say - 'no, we have decided to not receive these migrants. These
  >> people need to go from where they came'.

The refugee quotas you're talking about were decided by the EU interior ministers voting in the Justice and Home Affairs Council. The UK (along with Denmark and Ireland) has an opt-out so although its interior minister (at the time, Teresa May) did participate in the vote [1] it was not allocated any refugees [2].

Not a single one.

The UK instead had volunteered to take in 20,000 people [3], primarily children from Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. Despite volunteering, as far as I'm aware it's still prevaricating about actually taking them in. They're still languishing at Calais, or being held at detention centres in the UK.

I don't see how any of this shows that the EU "crushed" the UK, or that it caused the UK to lose sovereingty. The UK absolutely said "no, we have decided not to receive these migrants"- via the opt-outs I mentioned.

A very British thing, opt-outs. The UK has opt-outs for every little EU regulation, it seems. Yet the UK is always "losing its sovereignty" in the EU. How does that work?

___________________

[1] List of participants in the 22 September 2015 Justice and Home Affairs Council:

http://www.european-council.europa.eu/media/22968/2015-09-22...

[2] Council decision estabilishing provisional measures in the area of international protection for the benefit of Italy and Greece; see Annexes I and II, with allocations from Italy and Greece, respectively, to member states:

http://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-12098-2015-I...

[3] For a sense of perspective, France offered to take in 24,000; Germany famously has thrown its gates wide open; and about 2.7 million refugees are currently in Turkey, willingly or not.

> If I end up being banned from useful services because the costs of complying with the EU's very transparent attempts to bulk up their budget by repeatedly fining tech firms, I will not be happy.

Not a EU citizen (unfortunately!), but I would rather lose access to services that are violating data privacy laws. As always, vote with your feet and your dollars.

Apologies to PG, but it's time to "Regulate Things That Scale".

> There is a third option...cease trading with the EU...

This is the direct equivalent of demanding the right to dump whatever I like into the river, because some other company in another country can.

More generally, this is an example of "all regulation bad" thinking. If it is inherently evil to impose any rules on companies operating under your jurisdiction (and that's what you're implying with phrases like "obey us or we crush you")... Well, now you're arguing that no government should try to solve any coordination problem. No auto efficiency standards, no pollution regulations, no product safety standards...not a world I want to live in.

(I'm going to ignore the Brexit stuff, as that's a long-standing flamewar that's already producing more heat than light in this thread.)

GPDR doesn't impose rules on companies under EU jurisdiction. It tries to impose rules on all companies everywhere. The blog post is written by an American.

The rest of your argument reduces to "all regulation is good" thinking. I haven't made any arguments about regulation in general. However, passing a law so vague there are continuous arguments about how it affects backup strategies and attaching a 10-20 million euro penalty to it is absolutely a punishment out of proportion to the severity of the "crime" (which is itself not even remotely close in severity to polluting a river - which one has the chance to actually damage somebody's health? not data processing!).

Why is it out of proportion? Leaking, exposing or selling personal data can have much worse and immediate effects on someone’s lives than river pollution.

These rules aren't about leaking data accidentally (everyone already tried to stop that), "exposing" it is vague, not sure what you mean by that.

And as for selling personal data - er, how? People get drinking water from rivers. If they're polluted you can get very nasty symptoms. I've never heard of anyone being sent to hospital because someone sold their data.

At any rate, if the goal was to tackle data trading then there'd be no need for a "right to be forgotten" which is where most of the confusion and ambiguity comes from.

> More generally, this is an example of "all regulation bad" thinking

"any regulation good" is a fallacy as well, and just because data protection is a good thing, not all regulations claiming to achieve that are good, too.

And the GDPR is an especially bad and totally overblown regulation. I'd be totally fine with not being allowed to do bad things, since I'm not doing that anyway. I don't sell customer data, I don't collect PII from obscure third parties, I delete what I'm supposed to and I don't store what I should not.

Unfortunately, just not doing anything wrong does not help me at all, because GDPR requires basically everyone to be able to _prove_ , which -if possible at all- would take ages to implement properly. Sure, Google and Facebook can afford to spend a few man-years on this, and they can also afford a bunch of lawyers in case some obscure bureaucratic EU entity finds that they followed a wrong interpretation of the vague and unclear requirements in this directive.

As the sole developer for a small SaaS, I cannot afford that luxury. I can either write code, which earns me money, or I can write pages of pages of process documentation instead, which earns me nothing and does not even guarantee I won't be fined anyway, since who knows what obscure requirement may be hidden in those 201 pages of undecipherable legalese.

So my only realistic option is to do what most smaller businesses will do: Ignore the GDRP, and hope they won't come for me first. They probably won't, since they can't go after everyone at once. Sure, there's a rest risk, but hey, one can get cancer too. At least, if you get GDRP instead, you won't be dead, just broke.

I've worked for a few companies that handled clients' private information for financial purposes. There is a standard that you must observe if you work with payment cards, PCI-DSS. It is complicated and costly to implement in full, so some of the firms I worked for didn't - and instead avoided handling sensitive data that was subject to the strongest of protections specified by PCI-DSS. That meant, for example, never directly handling transactions and bouncing them off to PayPal instead. These were still successful companies, that kept growing while I was working for them.

One company I worked for sold software for card transactions and so needed to get the highest level of certification. They did and they worked very hard to achieve this, which is why they were (and I believe, still are) highly respected in the business. They also did great financially and had big contracts with huge clients.

There's also companies that specialise in that sort of thing- they help others get their PCI-DSS on. For a fee- but it's cheaper than doing it yourself, or paying the price of running wild with peoples' card data.

There are many more options than "ignore the standard" and "drown under it" is what I'm trying to say.

While this approach is reasonable and practical for credit card data, I doubt it's possible (let alone practical) for most businesses to do the same with what the GDPR considers personal data. You'd have to avoid email addresses, names, postal addresses, phone numbers, ... - even in fields where such data is not even supposed to be, like comments or emails.

Might be possible if one just sells ebooks or similar digital goods without much customer interaction. But for anything more complex than that, you're pretty much out of luck.

> But I am looking forward to living in a world where everyone has to comply.

I'm not: the so-called 'right' to be forgotten is terrible: it means that data immutability is essentially illegal, and it means that anyone can demand to rewrite history. That's just wrong.

PS: This is GDPR, not the EU VAT thing (also referred to by the OP). The former is painful but necessary; the latter is a straight-up unmanageable mess created by people with no understanding of the Internet. This is not a monolithic "all regulation good"/"all regulation bad" thing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com