Comment by jMyles | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jMyles | Hacker News Reader

1) I don't agree. I prefer to have GDPR in Europe, no GDPR in the USA, and see which turns out to be better for human rights. I suspect that GDPR will very soon start to be used by corrupt politicians and other criminals who want "to be forgotten" for their misdeeds (ie, censor us when we want to remind the public).

2) I can't help but notice that GDPR is a great idea for Brave / BAT. And look: I'm long on BAT (I'm not wealthy enough to be a whale or anything, but I bought a small amount in the very early days). But this seems self-interested to me, rather than an assessment of the proper course for American politics.

Eich admits this in part, of course, saying early in the letter that "I view the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as a great leveller. The GDPR establishes the conditions that can allow young, innovative companies like Brave to flourish."

But he also says "The enormous growth of ad-blocking by people across the globe (to 615 million active devices by late 2017) proves the terrible cost of inadequately regulating the tracking-based advertising system."

Does it? It seems to me that people are working to find ways to improve their lives, and that they'll keep doing so to the shegrin of the internet behemoths absent any "regulation". In other words, the state is not needed to make this phenomenon regular - it's already quite regular and becoming moreso.

Let Brave and Chrome fight it out and the best (not the most politically expedient) one win. For now, I'm using Firefox.

> GDPR will very soon start to be used by corrupt politicians and other criminals who want "to be forgotten" for their misdeeds

GDPR isn't the right to be forgotten, it's mainly about ownership of customer data, consent & privacy. You can have a look at this developer guide: https://techblog.bozho.net/gdpr-practical-guide-developers/ for what it means as a developer.

> GDPR isn't the right to be forgotten, it's mainly about ownership of customer data, consent & privacy.

I'm not sure if you're making a humorous observation about how the "right to be forgotten" is not a legitimate form of privacy. If you are, bravo.

If you're not, and you are actually unaware of article 17, please see this link:

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-17-gdpr/

I'm aware of this article, it's only for personal data (and especially targeted against data leaks & data gathering in its wording), you can't take off an article of the BBC with that. It's nothing like the French law about the Right to be forgotten.

There are experts on this topic who have this exact view of the "right to be forgotten" elements of this article. I'm literally at CANS in Naples right now and someone spoke on this subject yesterday.

I don't see anything about it that makes it "especially targeted against data leaks". It offers protections for free speech without being specific about what that means or how it is balanced.

Of course it's not the same as the French Law, but it's still a vector for threatening legal action against someone who wants to maintain and publish facts about an individual.

There was substantial hullabaloo about this here yesterday.

I mean, look, I'm a US national, so my knowledge is limited. But I've spent time in Europe and talked to many people (again, including some leading thinkers and European activists) and I'm telling you, without a shred of a doubt, that this concern exists here.

As with every law, we will see how it's actually used in practice but on my case I did not have much doubts about how it's supposed to be applied, I never understood it as an equivalent on the French one. For me, one of the goals here is when you delete your Facebook account, the data is actually deleted unlike what probably happens now.

There's been public analysis of the right to be forgotten. A few good reads: A summary article from NPR [1] and a research paper with a lot more details [2].

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/02/28/589411543...)

[2] https://g.co/research/rtbf_report

That's not the same concept as the one from the GDPR (even if they share the same name).

Ironically, I want an ad-blocker that hides all GDPR consent popovers, cookie warnings, etc. They are constant annoyance, especially on mobile. Also a browser that automatically uses a VPN when an American news site blocks European IPs.

So do I. Specifically, I want to block the consent popovers and refuse consent for all but the necessary cookies and tracking.

I think the EU missed a trick by not making Do Not Track legally enforceable.

Cookie "warnings" and forced "consent" popups (with no or difficult opt-out) are not GDPR compliant. GDPR mandates that all tracking and related bullshit should be opt-in. So the annoyance isn't the GDPR, it's the lack of enforcement of it that allow shit websites to get away with not being compliant.

That would be fantastic, at least for sites that comply with the GDPR - they don't get to bug me, and since I also don't explicitly opt-in, they also don't get to track me.

> It seems to me that people are working to find ways to improve their lives, and that they'll keep doing so to the shegrin of the internet behemoths absent any "regulation"

I'd agree with you if ad & tracking blocking was mainstream, or even better, built into major browsers & operating systems and enabled by default. We are not there yet (and might never be since a major OS developer - Google - has a vested interest in keeping the cancer that is called advertising alive) so we need regulation.

> I'd agree with you if ad & tracking blocking was mainstream

But isn't Eich making the argument that it is mainstream? That's the whole reason I'm quoting him here.

Which is it?

Is Eich correct that the "enormous growth of ad-blocking by people across the globe" is evidence of some desire on the part of a global community to fight back on the ability of internet giants to track us?

If so, isn't this evidence that this phenomenon is already "regular" without needing any further "regulation" by the state?

He's trying to eat his cake and still have it.

There being a desire to fight back does not mean that this fight is effective or avoiding an arms race (which is wasting resources for everyone).

> the cancer that is called advertising

In these conversations "advertising" is a very loaded term, not all advertising is tracking, not all advertising is invasive and not all advertising is served by shady clickbait companies.

With a little stretch even a review of a movie or a game is advertising. The GDPR might push toward a more sustainable advertising model and honestly I cannot see anything negative in that.

(also not all advertising is fake news and product discovery is a hard problem for both sellers and buyers)

Not all advertising is tracking and clickbait, but in general it is still a cancer on the Internet, and on the modern society. The world is oversaturated with advertising, and we're all forced to look at it everywhere, day in, day out. Advertising is eating absurd amount of resources directly and indirectly (through support industries - from graphics design to printing, transportation and distribution), mostly to shift the split of a fixed pie of customers, in what's pretty much a fractal of zero sum games.

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