Comment by maxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

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You probably should explain this statement.

I'm not the one who commented above, but I can see some problems with freedom of speech related to GDPR.

The main problem is that EU legislation is complex and subject to interpretation for which we have no precedents. Such legislation is easily exploited by authorities to silence opposition. As Napolen never said, "A Constitution should be short and obscure." GDPR is long and obscure. That leaves even more power to the executive.

This situation benefits large corporations - such as Facebook - who can afford an army of lawyers and can deploy resources to legal fights in any country. Small actors with dissenting views are hopelessly disadvantaged in this kind of a setup, and I forecast that we'll see authorities shutting down blogs and websites using GDPR as their tool.

> The main problem is that EU legislation is complex and subject to interpretation for which we have no precedents. Such legislation is easily exploited by authorities to silence opposition. As Napolen never said, "A Constitution should be short and obscure." GDPR is long and obscure. That leaves even more power to the executive.

I'm not sure what this has to with free speech though. Many laws (in any country / federation / commission / union) are long and complex. Not all are related to speech and/or freedom thereof. GDPR is not.

I take your point that complex laws favour the legal establishment and large corporations that can afford them, but again... what does that have to do with free speech in the context of the GDPR?

There seems to be no argument here... Is there something in GDPR I'm missing?

I think it is a free speech issue if "we'll see authorities shutting down blogs and websites using GDPR as their tool" which is what I predict.

> we'll see authorities shutting down blogs and websites using GDPR as their tool

If they're shutting down blogs, there's 2 possible reasons for it:

1. The blog is using a non-compliant commenting system. This may be hand-rolled or 3rd-party: in either case, disabling comments is a common-sense measure to stay up. No legal complexity of any document should obscure the simplicity of this solution.

2. The hosting company hosting the blogging platform is non-compliant and gets shut down completely. In this case, your argument re: the company being small and not understanding legalese hopefully shouldn't apply.

If they're shutting down websites, those websites are offering a user-oriented service of some kind, and should get their act together w.r.t. understanding the legal implications of doing this, no matter how small they are.

If you're not processing user data, you're not a target. Exercising free speech does not require processing user data.

> If they're shutting down blogs, there's 2 possible reasons for it:

There are other possible reasons. Like "we don't like it".

I live in the country where the corruption index (calculated by Transparency International) is lowest in the world. Still, we have a "black list" of web sites that the police distributes to Internet access providers to block users from accessing the sites. The legal basis of this is supposed to be stopping child pornography, but still, the mechanism is used for blocking sites that criticize the police, and have no pornography at all. And there is no legal mechanism to challenge the police and stop them from doing this.

GDPR gives many additional tools for authorities to perform censorship like this.

I have seen a lot of GDPR critics on HN saying that the right to be forgotten is censorship. That news articles about criminals should not be deleted. The GP is probably reiterating such sentiments.

Strangely, none of these critics ever seem to consider the opposite cases: what if a person was wrongly accused of murder, but was later found innocent? Old articles about his "suspicion for murder" should either be rectified or deleted. What is more important: to prevent an innocent person from being punished, or to be able to punish a legit criminal?

Or let's take something more mundane. If you posted embarassing party photos while you were a teenagers, and some site made a copy of those photos, shouldn't you be able to have them removed?

(Mind you: this particular critique on GDPR wasn't valid in the first place. GDPR article 17 states that the right to be forgotten does not apply "for archiving purposes in the public interest", among others.)

See also my other comment in this thread about the plastic surgery meme, "The only thing you’ll ever have to worry about is how to tell the kids". The meme is false but it ruined the woman's career.

If someone is wrongly accused of murder, and then he's found innocent, he was still a suspect during some time, so those articles are correct.

Yes those articles are correct, but do you think that's what most people would think when they read it? Most likely the articles on suspicion for murder are ranked top in the search results while the articles about being cleared are hard to find. Many people tend to be judgemental, or at least err on the side of caution. In this case, potential employers could feel "where there is smoke, there is fire" and would rather close the "suspicion for murder" news article tab immediately and decide not hire this person, rather than searching further.

Let me give you a real world example. You know that meme about plastic surgery, "The only thing you’ll ever have to worry about is how to tell the kids"? The woman in that meme in fact did not have plastic surgery, but most people thought the meme was true and was about her, without researching the truth. It ruined her career. https://nextshark.com/heidi-yeh-chinese-family-plastic-surge...

You can't treat the Internet as an append only database where you can rectify things by publishing more stuff. The human mind is bounded rational and most people only look at the first Google search results page.

No. Google should rank the "Suspect found NOT GUILTY of murder" as the top, most relevant page, because that is truly the most relevant. If Google refuses to rank this the top, it's out of sheer laziness, just like how they refused to fix the subversive content in Youtube Kids "because algorithms". If they did this in the first place, I think most people wouldn't care so much.

You say "should". Who guarantees that? News outlets are for profit organizations. If they judge "not guilty" as something that doesn't sell as well as "guilty" then they won't publish so much content about it, and because of Google's algorithm that latter won't be ranked very high.

Even if it's ranked high, a lot of readers would still end up with this feeling that "yeah the latest news article say that but MAYBE that guy DID do something wrong... let's not hire him just to be sure", i.e. "where there is smoke there is fire".

I just gave you a practical example about the plastic surgery meme. News articles about how the woman was ruined rank nowhere near as high as the meme itself.

I think we are in agreement. Google needs to change their AI/algorithms so that the more important, relevant aspect of every story increases in rank. Not the flashy click-baity articles.

I don’t think allowing the police to remove their errors from the Internet is a good thing.

Who said anything about the police? The GDPR does not say that the police has the right remove stuff. It allows courts to rule that a company must comply to a removal order.

It’s worth noting that around 85% of requests based on right to be forgotten were from public figures and institutions in 2016.

The legitimate cases are rare.

Actual statistics: https://transparencyreport.google.com/eu-privacy/overview?su...

88.7% of requests by private persons. And even excluding those, only 20.9% of the remaining request were made by gov institutions or politicians.

Please don't spread lies, thank you.

Interesting you mention that. In many places in Europe, it is forbidden to release the name of a suspect until they are found guilty or there's heavy evidence weighing against them. Specifically for that reason.

But what if a person was in fact found guilty, but counter-evidence later came up and he was once again ruled innocent? His name has been long published by then.

I agree with parent.

GDPR is a threat to freedom of speech while not changing much in term of privacy as worst actors is governements themselves. Edward Snowden revalations are 100x worse than whatever worse FB scenario you are picking.

GDPR sets a bad precedent with local laws impacting foreign businesses. In this logic, why Chinese speech laws shouldn’t apply to EU and US companies if GDPR applies globally?

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Nothing wrong with taking inspiration from other country laws. My original point is that GDPR is fundamently wrong. It’s infringing with freedom of speech by making new social network harder to create for dubious privacy gains. If you think FB is wrong, the best way to take it down is to replace it, not try to make it compliant.

> GDPR sets a bad precedent with local laws impacting foreign businesses.

The U.S. set that precedent 2 decades ago with the DMCA.

Don't like it? Then don't deal with EU citizens and residents. Don't like that? Fine, just don't go to the EU, or have any assets in the EU.

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