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Comment by jimktrains2 | Hacker News Reader

> I don’t “understand” it because it’s not true (controls need not be technical; they can be regulatory, policy, or other methods).

No, control is only one thing: the ability to constrain the actions of another. You can _never_ prevent your ex from sharing nudes of you; you can only recover damages.

> Save your apologies

I'm not appologizing for anyone.

> regulation is coming to fix the deficiencies in data rights and protection

No, regulations are coming to give users a false sense of empowerment at the cost of everyone else.

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I agree with you in principle but your argument has veered into unsound territory. Do you not believe it's possible for the threat of damages to end up preventing an ex from sharing nudes of you that they otherwise might have? Sure, there's a level of determination that will surpass that barrier, but at least there's a barrier.

Fear of damages isn't control. You can't force an ex to delete those nudes for instance, or prevent them from letting their friends view them.

Threatening someone with consequences if they perform some action may not prevent them from doing what they are determined to do, but it will dissuade many. The entire basis of modern society and law is built on the idea of threatening people if they break the law, rather than completely preventing them from doing anything illegal. This is not control in, say, the unix permissions sense, but it's control in common parlance.

What are you actually trying to say here?

Sure you can. You can lock up anyone who isn't willing to obey the law and continues to cause harm to your ex by sharing the photos, for example. In fact, since revenge porn is now a criminal offence in many civilised countries, that is very likely what will happen.

If anything, the anomaly here is that inappropriately using or sharing personal data about someone is in most cases still only a regulatory or at most civil matter and not a criminal offence. Obviously such an act can potentially cause far more harm to that individual than many physical acts of violence that do carry jail time.

>Sure you can. You can lock up anyone who isn't willing to obey the law and continues to cause harm to your ex by sharing the photos, for example.

Actually, this isn't true, for the purposes of this analogy.

You can only lock up people who are in your country and under the control of your legal system. If your ex flees to Russia and sends out these photos from there, good luck prosecuting them and putting them in jail.

This is the internet we're talking about. An EU law doesn't apply outside the EU, in places like Russia, the US, China, and many other locales. What's the EU going to do when sites in those other countries refuse to take down pictures based on this EU law?

If fear of damages isn't control, then you have no control as anyone can break into your home and steal your photo.

Following this logic to its conclusion, there is no such thing as control and all laws are pointless. You can't force people not to kill each other, but you can enforce punishments that dissuade people from doing it (and in some countries create regulations to make it harder to acquire tools to do said killing). Same thing goes for stealing, perjury, fraud, assault, breach of contract, defamation, etc.

I actually cannot think of a single instance where someone has "control" over something and the law exists purely as a way of exercising that control, and I can think of hundreds of examples where laws exist to stop people from doing things they may be physically capable of doing but would produce a negative effect on society if permitted. Maybe there is such an example, but it'd be an outlier.

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