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> Sounds awfully cultish, and it also happens to be wrong.

GDPR is a piece of human rights legislation. For entirely sensible historical reasons, Europeans are acutely sensitive to issues of privacy. Many of them were born and raised in totalitarian regimes and learned painful lessons about the dangers of mass surveillance.

By passing the GDPR, the European Parliament said in no uncertain terms "if you can't run a business without infringing the rights of our citizens, we don't want you to do business in our Union". The citizens of that union are supportive of the decision taken by their democratically elected representatives.

> GDPR is a piece of human rights legislation.

Not only that, to a certain degree it also influences IT security: Companies with a data breach have 72 hours to report it.

No more sitting out breaches until users can find their own data on some obscure Russian forum, 2 years later.

As a note - this is only one interpretation of the situation. In my opinion, if the privacy policy of a website is clear, then using their service and having one's collected data used as stated is not infringing on anyone's rights.

Most users aren't tech savvy enough to block tracking technologies and don't have the legal knowledge to actually understand byzantine privacy policies written in deliberately confusing legalese. It's not obvious that the presence of a "like" button, an ad unit or a hidden pixel means that you're being tracked by a third party. None of us have the time to actually read and understand the privacy policies of every single website we visit. The old "by visiting your website, you agree to our terms and conditions" doesn't actually give users any choice in the matter - you're being tracked before you've actually had the chance to read the policy. Opt-ins without opt-outs create a ratchet effect of ever-diminishing privacy, especially when those opt-ins include overly-broad third-party permissions.

GDPR doesn't stop you from creating a service that's a massive invasion of privacy, but you've got to ask permission first in plain language and allow people to change their minds later. If it turns out that users aren't willing to give that permission and revoke permissions that they have previously granted, it vindicates one of the basic arguments for GDPR - users wanted privacy, but they weren't being offered the opportunity to make a free and informed decision.

Consent must be informed in all cases. If a user does not know the privacy policy of your website while using it, it is not informed consent. How do you make sure that the user is aware of the privacy policy while using the website?

Are you talking about cookie tracking? Most websites show their privacy policy or provide a link when you sign up, before one provides any personal information. Either way, nearly all websites have a privacy policy in their footer which can be read before continuing.

"the party line"? That sort of emotive language sounds like something from Fox News or Heritage Foundation.

A small number of huge American tech companies have most to lose on this. These are the ones who play fast and loose with people's privacy.

If these new laws change the focus of business investment in Europe to those who respect privacy, that's a big win for all European citizens.

Now it's time for Margrethe Vestager to start cutting those huge American tech monopolies down to size!

That's not just emotive language, it's insulting and degrading. The GDPR is a multi-party, supranational, democratically legitimized regulation. Also, I haven't seen a single PR campaign about the GDPR, and I'm from "over there". The grandparent is not arguing objectively nor purely based on facts.

Huh? It’s not meant to be insulting, nor could I find any reference in any culture in which it would be considered an insult. It simply means that all of you from the EU seem to say the same things about GDPR - that it’s wonderful, has no downsides, that our new self-declared privacy overlords will be kind and benevolent, etc. It’s like there is one person behind all of your accounts, and that person is a big fan of it. That’s why I used the non-derogatory term “party line”.

See https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/party%20line

"Party line" implies that it's a position everyone's obliged to take as part of being a party member, rather than something freely and independently reached.

And I suspect the main driver for GDPR cheering is that nothing else has been done about so many other privacy incidents. We can look back on HN and find such things as the massive Equifax leak (the next one of those is going to be interesting!) and the smart TVs that exfiltrate a list of all files on any media inserted.

That is in turn called a strawman. And there are many different opinions in the EU regarding the GDPR. I think HN users are non-representative of the general public since they tend to be a lot more concerned about privacy issues - and that no just the users from the EU. But in general, the EU does seem overall more positive towards regulation of business than Americans.

> Sounds awfully cultish

This is some high-strung rhetoric. And claiming GDPR outlaws machine learning is just FUD. ML performed on personal data collected without the user's consent is illegal - but so is doing anything with illegally obtained data. ML is not the issue here, and ML has many other applications besides stealth user profiling.

Please see https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/how-will-the-gdpr-impact-machi...

Keep reading:

"So why is interpreting the GDPR as placing a ban on ML so misleading?

Because there are significant exceptions to the prohibition on the autonomous use of ML—meaning that “prohibition” is way too strong of a word. Once the GDPR goes into effect, data scientists should expect most applications of ML to be achievable—just with a compliance burden they won’t be able to ignore.

Now, a bit more detail on the exceptions to the prohibition.

The regulation identifies three areas where the use of autonomous decisions is legal: where the processing is necessary for contractual reasons, where it’s separately authorized by another law, or when the data subject has explicitly consented.

In practice, it’s that last basis—when a data subject has explicitly allowed their data to be used by a model—that’s likely to be a common way around this prohibition. Managing user consent is not easy. Users can consent to many different types of data processing, and they can also withdraw that consent at anytime, meaning that consent management needs to be granular (allowing many different forms of consent), dynamic (allowing consent to be withdrawn), and user friendly enough that data subjects are actually empowered to understand how their data is being used and to assert control over that use.

So, does the GDPR really prohibit the use of ML models? Not completely - but it will, in many of ML’s most powerful use cases, make the deployment and management of these models and their input data increasingly difficult."

There was already european privacy legislation which was just as strict, and companies like google and facebook already had been fined under those laws (though not to the degree that GDPR allows). What GDPR does is harmonize this kind of legislation across europe. You can argue that it is now easier for startups to build a product that targets the european market, since there is only a single set of rules to follow.

> The reality is that startup investment in the EU will shrink across the board because of the risks imposed by the GDPR.

There are no additional risks imposed by GDPR; all of those risks already exist in other privacy directives.

>The GDPR also outlaws most machine learning applications,

Can you point to the specific bit of GDPR that outlaws machine learning?

Can you point to the specific bit of GDPR that outlaws machine learning?

Here's a whole article on the subject [1] and HN discussion thread [2] . Any machine learning application that utilizes automated decision making - which is the entire point of machine learning - is forbidden under the GDPR. This can be overcome with explicit consent for that specific application of ML, but getting that in most circumstances will be a low percentage shot.

There are no additional risks imposed by GDPR; all of those risks already exist in other privacy directives.

Fines of up to 20 million EUR are a significant and new risk.

[1] https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/how-will-the-gdpr-impact-machi...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17138354

>Any machine learning application that utilizes automated decision making - which is the entire point of machine learning - is forbidden under the GDPR.

Not true. Article 22 allows automated decision making if it is contractually necessary, is authorised by law or is based on explicit consent.

Many use-cases for machine learning do not constitute automated decision making within the meaning of Article 22, because they do not produce "legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her". Using ML to recommend a product or enhance a photo is perfectly permissible without any special safeguards. Most ML models based on personal data are effectively anonymous in line with Recital 26, so are not considered to be personal data.

If you're using ML in a way that respects the rights of users, GDPR is not a significant obstacle.

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/

https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-26/

”The GDPR, as a matter of law, does contain a blanket prohibition on the use of automated decision-making, so long as that decision-making occurs without human intervention and produces significant effects on data subjects. Importantly, the GDPR itself applies to all uses of EU data that could potentially identify a data subject—which, in any data science program using large volumes of data, means that the GDPR will apply to almost all activities (as study after study has illustrated the ability to identify individuals given enough data).”

From https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/how-will-the-gdpr-impact-machi...

That stuff is completely ridiculous. If your news aggregator ran a ML-based application to filter out science-related articles so as to keep out click-bait, bogus articles, you'll be able to continue running it without any problem. It doesn't even have anything to do with GDPR.

Ah, yes, if what your ML application does is suck user data on one end and produce "useful" information on the other end, then you will have a hard time explaining users why you need to collect all that data and why you need to hold it in storage for as long as you do. Because, indeed, you don't really know how that data is processed, nor how long do you really need to keep it. (This is very much an oversimplification though; many ML-based things don't necessarily fall under the rule about automated decision-based making)

Both are pieces of information that should be essential to making an informed decision about whether or not to allow private data to be collected. If you can't provide it, you need a better business plan. I'm really sorry that your founder won't be able to buy that new yacht this summer but it's hardly my problem -- and it does nothing to stiffle ML progress.

In fact, if anything, it'll be beneficial to society if some smart people give up doing ML to show ads and go someplace where they can apply ML to something useful.

Can you point out some examples of machine learning usages where: (a) they are clearly beneficial for the users; (b) it wasn't forbidden before; and (c) it is very hard to get user's consent for them.

I'm going to point out some counter-examples:

- One of the first machine learning stories around was movie recommendation. Under GDPR, when you click the "Recommended for me" link in your typical movie recommender, they now have to show you a page that says something on the lines of:

> UberRecommender needs to automatically process your previous ratings/view history/whatever data to make you good recommendations. We will find users with similar taste to yours, recommend movies they have liked to you and vice-versa. Click on "I agree" to continue, or "I don't agree" to disable this functionality for your account (you may change this preference later on in your settings page).

It doesn't seem too difficult to get people to click that "I agree" button, does it?

- Machine learning applied to medical diagnosis/early detection/etc. This usage was already heavily regulated (at least in the EU). So much that I'm pretty sure the GDPR does not change anything in that space.

The existing fines in the UK of upto £500,000 are a significant risk, but don't seem to have had much impact on start ups. It should also be reassuring to see that the maximum fine of £500,000 has never been applied.

A company really has to do terrible things to data to come anywhere near the €20m maximum fine.