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Comment by buboard | Hacker News Reader

GDPR is europe's problem, not of the entire "email industry"

It is a problem when you are targeting users from Europe, which you are doing almost certainly.

We already have more than enough cookie popups and "heads up" emails whenever a company changes a comma in their ToS. GDPR is a bureaucratic madness and not something to be imitated.

Want to educate users about privacy? do it with extensive educational campaigns, not by ruining everyone's experience on the web

What really infuriates me is this: "We respect your privacy, click here".

But the general idea of GDPR is not only to educate. It also aims to give you tools at your disposal to control how and if your data is processed and stored. That is the most remarkable feat of GDPR. To complain that this is "bureaucratic madness" is not a problem with the regulation, it is a problem with your perception of personal data. If you didn't have tools before to enable users to control _their_ personal data, you are the problem and it is definitively good that you now have to invest into making sure you create those tools.

> do it with extensive educational campaigns

And the point of GDPR is to give users the information to let consumers make informed choices and to make companies abide by those choices.

There's no point in 'extensive education' if the consumer is still powerless to exercise that knowledge.

It's not GDPR's fault that websites have awful user experience. If they really cared about privacy then they wouldn't use popups that required multiple clicks to remove tracking cookies.

If you have to untick boxes they're not in compliance with GDPR. If the button to not have tracking is gray and "accept all" is green, you're not in compliance. Many websites deliberately try to make it harder to opt-out, which is directly against the GDPR.

GDPR wants to ensure that user privacy is protected. If you do that in your business, you don't need to show any cookie popups.

A honest cookie popup would ask "Do you want to be tracked for advertising purposes? yes/no", and any sane person would klick "no". No education needed at all, if the advertisement industry would play honest.

If the Web experience is ruined now, the Web advertisement industry needs to fix it.

Cookie popups are not caused by GDPR.

GDPR is Europe's (attempted) solution to a problem. It affects companies globally [1].

[1] https://www.americanbar.org/groups/international_law/publica...

So what, so do American tax-lawes (targetting Americans) and affect the rest of the world's citizens, FACTA.

I was arguing against two points made above:

1) "GDPR is europe's problem" --> I'm saying it's an attempted solution, not a problem

2) "not of the entire 'email industry'" --> the whole 'email industry' is in fact, affected. Where you operate from isn't a factor. Only if you don't email EU citizens (which is quite unlikely), you don't have to worry about it. If you do (which is very likely), you should know and implement GDPR rules.

I understand your FACTA analogy, but don't see how you disagree with me.

I misunderstood the fact that you don't see it a as a problem.

I don't think the GDPR solves much or anything, iff you want to play on the internet, almost [there are good exceptions, where you can just choose to have a 'lesser' experience] all of the time you'll have to click "I agree".

The GDPR is much more than an EU regulation that forces a cookie wall. In fact, there is no cookie wall obligation anywhere. The fact that companies are so uncreative and can only come up with these silly solutions shows how broken the internet is and how widespread tracking is.

GDPR does solve some problems, in my view. For example, it allows EU citizens to ask companies to disclose what they know about them and how it is being used. You can ask companies (and they must comply) to delete your records. Data must be pseudonymized / anonymized in many cases. Those are all real effects. It offers transparency and gives more control to individuals.

If you want to learn more about what the GDPR does do, what protection and control it brings EU citizens, I refer you to the wikipedia page which has all of that and more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula...

> I don't think the GDPR solves much or anything, iff you want to play on the internet, almost … all of the time you'll have to click "I agree".

That in itself is a GDPR violation. If you care enough, report it. That said, this is not what happens “almost all of the time” at all. In my experience most websites are completely or partially usable when you disagree with being tracked. At worst (and also in violation of GDPR), the tracking dialog makes it intentionally difficult to refuse being tracked.

The problem is that some places in the world don't have the GDPR, or something equivalent.

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