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Comment by GiuseppaAcciaio | Hacker News Reader

I have to confess, it's a guilty pleasure of mine to respond with a variant of the Nightmare GDPR letter to SOME companies who sent me the classic "we're sure that you want to access all the amazing benefits of our data processing so if you REALLY want to opt-out you'll need to click on this link and manually remove consent from a couple hundred 3rd party providers" email. I'd never do that to any company (big or small) with whom I have legitimately interacted, but a lot of this drivel has come from random recruitment companies that must have scraped my details from my CV or Linkedin or wherever.

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If you're not legitimately concerned then you are actually devaluing the GDPR by abusing it. If you have a legitimate concern with a particular company I'd send them a custom letter rather than a form letter and I'd try to work with them in order to achieve the desired effect (for instance: for them to delete my data once and for all) rather than to get a bunch of information that I have no further use for.

Alright, let me rephrase: I am interested in such companies that somehow have my details on record despite me never contacting them, and who show no understanding of the principles of GDPR; in particular I want to know what they hold about me and what the source of their data is, which is why I send the letter (which I have modified to remove the stuff I am not concerned about). Some of them have since replied with "we've gone ahead and deleted all your data", which could be interpreted in many ways I guess

Anywhere that has made my acceptance an "opt in" I have then sent a polite email asking for my details to be removed. I'm happy to continue to use any services that follow GDPR and use them with the minimum of fuss; but anywhere that feels like they're trying to worm their way around the law feels like the kind of organisation the GDPR is designed to protect us against.

Thankfully the responses I've had thus far have been equally amicable.

The most friction so far that I've seen are some news organizations that seem to do what they can do mis-interpret the law. I have no idea what made them think that's the right response but it is almost as if they are doing it willfully.

For the rest of it hardly any interaction to date other than that the spam volume seems to have dropped 50% or even more overnight.

I can't speak for news outlets outside of the UK but the ones here are largely anti-EU anyway.

Any company I didn't give my data to directly and have never heard of is a concern. Many companies sending out GDPR emails need to learn that processing data is a liability they should avoid if possible.

Yes, that would be a concern. But this is not that situation, the letter writer states clearly they are a customer of the company and they use examples from other companies to create a situation of faux concern about the addressee. That's not a request made in good faith and that street runs both ways.

That’s a fair point, but seems to be overly focused on how the template states things about being a customer.

The template clearly is intended for a broad set of situations, and easily modifiable fir businesses where you did not realize they had data about you.

In that situation I would write a completely different letter.

But as a customer of a company in good standing this letter is over the top and in some places dishonest.

I would still see this letter as appropriate, with minor tweaks, to a company “in good standing.”

(More broadly, I’m not sure I know of even a single company I would consider to be in good standing on this topic without first making them prove it. Certainly not any medium-sized or large company, however good-natured they might seem.)

Don't worry. The GDPR does a bang up job of devaluing itself.

We may wish for spherical users in a vacuum, but there are a lot of people out there looking to fuck their enemies over and who care little about the collateral damage to the commons.

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