My guide to being GDPR compliant: don't do business in the EU.
Much simpler.
Much simpler.
I'm quite enjoying the weird interstitial pages from a variety of US-based sites that block EU users. It's like a massive billboard saying "WE ARE USING YOUR DATA IN WAYS THAT YOU DON'T CONTROL", and is a reminder to use other services elsewhere.
GDPR is relatively straightforward to comply with, particularly for the simpler kind of sites that don't seem to have bothered. It basically codifies the sort of best practice that should have been in place already, and I'm sure many of us are happy to see that there is movement towards regulating the disastrous dumpster fire of personal data in this way.
It maybe a case where this is the intended consequence of the law but it wasn’t sold that way ahead of time.
European publications are being even more impacted by this as they can’t resort to blocking. It will be very interesting how this impacts the publishers in the next few years.
The biggest complaints come from foreigners, if you haven't noticed.
Major publications, for instance Der Spiegel, which are trying to be compliant by following that standard (and they had to do major work to do so) may find they are out of compliance http://www.spiegel.de/extra/what-we-do-with-your-data-a-1211...
Similar complaints have been brought against publishers that used googles compliance framework.
For a small site, having to appoint a representative in the Union might not be straightforward. See Article 27. They might be excused from this requirement by meeting the three conditions given in Article 27(2)(a), but that is vague.
> Much simpler.
As an American, could you please tell me what businesses you run, so that I can make a note to avoid dealing with them in the future?
Thanks in advance.
As an American, I'm suprised you aren't skeptical of a foreign government trying to control what you do.
It's a foolproof plan really.
You jest, but this is exactly what at least one of my businesses is about to do. We are in the UK, so Brexit uncertainty dominates any sort of EU-related planning for the next few months. The EU VAT rules for digital sales were already full of complication and red tape, and right now we don't even know whether the existing UK government systems will still be operating after the end of the current quarter on 31 March because it might all disappear with Brexit on 29 March.
When we took professional advice on how to prepare for this as well as we can under the circumstances, no-one in the room had any confidence in what little formal guidance exists so far or that the official positions currently set out by either the UK or EU governments will be realistic when the time comes. The consensus (by which I mean "view strongly advocated by literally every professional advisor in the room") was to suspend sales to rEU states until the dust has settled, and just redirect our efforts and finite budgets towards customers elsewhere in the meantime. That will inevitably involve some short term financial cost, but then so would making major changes in our technical systems and accounting practices at short notice to comply with all foreseeable possibilities at the start of April.
I don't find it inconceivable that lawyers in places like the US might give similar advice to some clients regarding the GDPR for similar reasons. If the clients are primarily dealing with data subjects outside the EU as well, avoiding the entire area as much as possible might be a reasonable position to take, even if again it's only temporarily until there is more known about the real implications of the GDPR as guidance and the first enforcement actions start to resolve the uncertainties.
Can you explain how you store Zero data but you are not sure? Are you referring at the fact that you include third party code or use third party services?
The fact that the laws are not simple is because they need to define things very specifically to make it impossible for "clever" people to interpret them different then the "spirit oft he law"
Worth it in the long run, as once we're used to it and tweaks to the law happen to make it easier/better? Sure. Easy? Heck no.
Third parties lying to you wont get you in trouble, it'll get them in trouble with the GDPR enforcers, so it's not worth doing that sort of "what if" exercise.
I've worked for organisations of many sizes. Basic data sanitation (aka, don't be daft) is enough. Give the GDPR a read, it's clear enough for almost all cases and isn't nearly as bad as some folks here on HN would have you believe.
Customer IDs are fine as long as they can't be associated with other information anywhere else, but if they can, it's an issue.
Sanitation is easy but someone, somewhere will screw it up when you're not looking.
I seen the issue you described where an exception will log all the function parameters but if I am not wrong this logs are configurable so you can check the framework you use about this logs and probably is a good idea to delete old error logs(I know as developers we are busy and don't want to mess with log configs and cronjobs etc but even without GDPR an error log file containing DB data since 2017 is a security risk)
Okay then...
I think the reason there's so much defensiveness about GDPR is because it is legitimately a rare and valuable victory of data privacy advocates. From that perspective, the smug "just don't do business in the EU" meme might seems like a sentiment that ignores that victory so much that many probably assume it was born out of hostility to data privacy advocacy.
I did seen institutions doing unnecessary crazy things or waking up a day before it went valid etc. There is no way this was avoidable entirely and given people trying to lobby against it by essentially lying, all in all it went quite well.
I disagree. I'm not sure what you've read about GPDR, but see the link I posted above. If you read the ICO guidance and still think it's insanely complicated, I'm not sure what to suggest because by that yardstick any legal matter is going to be insanely complicated and you'd be saying the same about any legislation. Do you have an example of any legislation that you'd say is better?
Just the scale of the ICO's guidance -- which still primarily covers only general principles without getting much into specific practices and concrete examples -- tells us that this is a complicated issue.
I'd suggest that one obvious comparison is with not having the GDPR.
I know my own businesses spent considerable time and money understanding the implications and updating our documentation to comply with the new requirements. However, that was basically all we changed in the end, because we weren't doing anything particularly unusual or dodgy in the first place. In other words, for us, the whole thing was basically an expensive box-ticking exercise with no real benefit to anyone.
I imagine there are many other small businesses that could tell a similar story. The most likely alternative for those that can't is probably that they're not compliant, either deliberately or through ignorance of their new legal obligations, so that still doesn't benefit data subjects in any useful way.
It seems realistic to estimate that several billion pounds has been spent on this sort of paper-pushing exercise in the UK alone, which does suggest some level of rhetorical insanity here if it hasn't really benefited anyone in any measurable way. Perhaps time will tell and regulators will be more effective in curbing the excesses of the big data crunchers that these rules were presumably aimed at, but until we start seeing evidence of real benefits for the average person in the street, I for one will remain sceptical about whether all the extra red tape and complexity was justified.
> Perhaps time will tell and regulators will be more effective in curbing the excesses of the big data crunchers that these rules were presumably aimed at...
Fair points. We've spent a decent amount of time working through GDPR implications for clients, and if nothing concrete comes out of this for the Googles / Facebooks of the world - which may take 5-10 years to judge - I'll be pretty angry too.
> until we start seeing evidence of real benefits for the average person in the street
I think there are already obvious tangible benefits. Our clients now have very clear markers on their websites about what data is going to be used and how. We've persuaded some of them to purge tens of thousands of email addresses from their lists that probably weren't even DPA compliant just because of the threat of GDPR, and I've spoken to non-tech people who feel more in control of data when signing up for things now. Not all organisations are following best practices - bundled consent seems to be pretty common still - but it feels like it's going in the right direction.
I am not even thinking that GDPR is implemented/written very greatly, and i was fearing too that it will mainly help to put small businesses out of any product category where storing even just an Email address is necessary(eg have an login and want to enable users to restoa forgotten password) while big companies have their lawyers to allow them keep abusing our data on the edge of legal possibilities and not to our favour...
So Im not yet sure if having no GDPR is better or worse than having none... Just, simply saying if you have data protection laws i avoid your market without any detailed reason or proposal how to improve doesn’t bring us forward...