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Comment by windowshopping | Hacker News Reader

Data protection we do need indeed, but the EU is the last entity I want to be emulating on internet laws, except maybe China.

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What specifically do you take exception to with regard to GDPR/EU Internet laws? Having hands-on experience with compliance, I find GDPR to be quite reasonable - if anything, I'd say it's overly lax with regards to deletion of data that's not visible to the user (i.e. logs, 'shadow profiles', etc.).

What material harm or damage to you or your person did you experience prior to GDPR that GDPR has prevented or compensated for?

What material harm or damage would you suffer if I snooped on all of your Internet browsing activity with the knowledge of who you are in real life and kept that information around forever to use for whatever purposes I so choose?

Straw man. That’s not analogous to what was being discussed. A better analogy is: HN can see my email because I gave it to them to login. I don’t need to request what HN is doing with my email, because I already know I gave it to them. Giving them my email doesn’t harm me. Using it to do something illegal might, but the GDPR wouldn’t be able to stop that.

You misunderstand how third-party cookies & tracking work. You also misunderstand the intent of the legislation if you think GDPR is about preventing 'illegal' things. It's about protecting individual citizens' sovereignty and privacy.

Maybe GDPR is okay, I'm not terribly well informed about it. But every couple weeks the entire internet is up in arms against a new attempt by the EU to censor the entire internet, and I've been dealing for too long with the damn "We use cookies" pop-up they ignorantly required.

So I'm just saying their track record isn't great.

> the entire internet is up in arms against a new attempt by the EU to censor the entire internet

I must be out of the loop because I'm not familiar with what "the entire Internet" is up in arms about. Can you give a specific example?

Re:cookies - you do realize that "we use cookies" almost universally means "we use third-party cookies" and that third-party cookies are the number one way that advertisers and other unsavory entities track your Internet usage across sites, right? Don't you think people deserve to know that their Internet usage is essentially being tracked granularly without their consent or knowledge for profit? If not, why not?

I just love having internet laws written by people who can't use a computer without help. Makes so much sense...

Do you actually know any MEP? The younger generations are less stupid than you might think.

Politics is a slow game, the people who grew up with Windows 95 are only now starting to get elected.

In the current legislature, there is one former software programmer MEP and a Linus's uncle, who is not a programmer but knows a bit about software.

There's also Julia Reda, but she is really just a filesharer and a politician.

Small correction: Finnish MEP Nils Torvalds is actually Linus’s dad.

I know Elly Schlein is switched on, although she works mostly on non-IT topics. I'm sure there are many others.

Is something wrong with the data protections laws that apply to medical data? Those could be expanded for all private data.

Like a 35 year old with a degree in information and communications technology law?

Seems like he might possibly have encountered a computer or two given his special interests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Philipp_Albrecht

As well as GDPR, which is one of the better IT related laws, he has sensible views on mass surveillance.

That's acute, considering there's at least a couple of major competitors in every area of Chinese internet economy, unlike the Google, Facebook, YouTube and Amazon de-facto monopoly.

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