How to effectively evade the GDPR and the reach of the DPA
blog.zoller.lu
blog.zoller.lu
Seriously shady company.
I don't understand, who threatened you with a lawsuit? Why did they care about RocketReach?
They only retracted the thread after we could prove (via Google Cache and archive.org) that the page was very recently modified to show such a big revenue and threatened to report them for fraud.
We probably could've deflected the case since the company was public and therefore its revenue was also public, but, as a very small company, we had neither time nor money to spare for an useless lawsuit. And we assume that this was their bet. We switched to a competitor after this, obviously.
[0] It later actually turned out that this AGB change was after our purchase and not yet affecting us, but we didn't know that at the time.
Good call ditching them.
[edit] speculative aside...
What if they were intentionally feeding rocketreech miss-information? it might seem far fetched but these personal data collecting companies like rocketreach or even equifax obtain their information from a variety of untrustworthy sources.
I was a victim of this through my own foolishness a couple years ago:
I was using a car insurance comparison site and guessed one piece of the required information I couldn't completely remember - a speeding ticket date - I couldn't remember the exact year. Turns out I entered it exactly one year off, and it was so long ago anyway that it had no bearing on the quotes.
After continuing with my existing insurer, a few months later my insurer sent me a demand for a rather large quantity of money... that's right, they attempted to backcharge me for 5 years worth of insurance over an extra speeding ticket they had "discovered". Obviously there was no way I would pay them but it was extremely difficult to convince them to stop harassing me for this money even though they had no proof. Even after demanding they provide evidence of their discovery which they refused.
It's scary how easy this is to do, and I wasn't even trying.
Yes, that was really strange. We though they might need quick money, as this was right at the beginning of the corona crisis. Still, not acceptable.
> What if they were intentionally feeding rocketreech miss-information?
That's possible but quite strange. This information is public in our country, so there is a known reliable source and they should've known better.
> Obviously there was no way I would pay them but it was extremely difficult to convince them to stop harassing me for this money even though they had no proof.
Yes, this is quite usual. We were seriously lucky we discovered the change; but, given that they backed up so quick after calling it a fraud, I'm seriously assuming it was.
I assume that in the coming years (or decade?) there will be more efforts to ensure the enforcement of EU law for foreign companies that offer services to EU citizens as part of trade deals.
Right now there's e.g. a flourishing industry of data brokers in Israel that illegally collects data from EU (and US) citizens and sells it, a practice which is hard to stop as well since most of these companies don't have offices in the EU.
I think another possible strategy would be to go after the clients of these companies. If they can't legally sell their data to companies in the EU or US their business model would falter. The GDPR actually mandates that you as a data controller validate that companies which process data for you adhere to GDPR principles. Right now it seems this isn't being enforced much yet but I think it will be soon, which hopefully will have an effect on data brokers outside the EU as well.
While accessing any user personal details you need to have user consent to process their personal data. You can't simply buy the dataset and assume it has consent. When you buy data from data provider you need to make sure user gave consent to handle data by third-parties to that provider in accordance to GDPR. Users can revoke the consent, every party needs to be ready to handle that scenario. Any data export outside EU GDPR also needs consent. Moreover the dataset needs to be registered with local regulator.
Consent is only one of the lawful bases for processing data under the GDPR. In practice, it's the one almost everyone tries not to rely on unless they can't avoid it, because it comes with extra obligations that other bases might not.
Basically all I know are based on either mandatory by law record keeping, or records used to fulfill whatever service/product/goods the user purchased, but even in these cases the processing must be described, right?
https://gdpr-info.eu/art-6-gdpr/
What the source material won't tell you, for better or worse, is how these are interpreted in reality by data controller, processors and regulators. The two main things to know in that respect are:
1. Relying on the subject's consent is usually the last resort. It comes with lots of extra strings attached.
2. The "legitimate interests" provision is open to interpretation. It is widely used as an excuse for processing that many of us might consider far from desirable. But it is also a risk for data processors doing things many of us might consider reasonable, because any regulator can take a different view and they get to win by default.
I guess the information is out there, and doing so also makes it definitively personal for the policy makers / enforcers involved.
That said, the policy makers / enforcers may be genuinely hamstrung. The US imposes its laws globally because of it's status as a global reserve currency (trading in USD requires the transaction to route via the US, thus making the entity subject to US law).
The EU doesn't have such status or power over US companies. The most it can do is try to prevent them from operating in the region.
As a person who almost certainly has his personal information being sold on this platform, I'm not pleased, and would love to see something done to prevent this kind of activity. Unfortunately, that depends on the US government to take action, and the last 12 years haven't been a flying endorsement of the effectiveness of the current government system. (This is not meant as an statement regarding the effectiveness of either President, but rather a regarding the low output from the system as a whole)
US companies operating in the EU are subject to EU law. Worst case the company itself doesn't operate in the EU, however that still leaves its customers (Intel, AirBnB, etc. ) potential targets to apply pressure on.
I generally don’t know in this case. But in general my European friends seem to think that merely having someone from the EU access a website makes that website’s owner have a presence in the EU, even if the server that handled it isn’t. That seems like overreach to me. If that were the case, I’d block EU access for any of my domains, and I don’t think we want a future where that becomes the norm. The ideals of the Internet are free exchange of ideas and information, no country-specific walled gardens.
There's also the question of who they sell the data to. It's hard to see why they would sell EU citizens/residents data to companies who don't have any EU presence themselves, so at least some of their customers are bound by the GDPR as far as these are concerned. Informed consent is required at every step, so for example they would need the EU subject's consent to buy that data from RocketReach.
As for over-reach, the practical reality is that laws can be enforced extra-territorially if, and only if, the country that wants them has leverage. In some cases, that comes from making deals with other governments, where one or both give weight to the other's claims voluntarily in their own territory.
In other cases, it comes from networking effects. If you are a US-based business running a US-based website with no presence of any kind in the EU, then maybe the EU can't do anything to hurt you. On the other hand, if you have any relationships with other businesses that are within reach of the EU, they might be used as leverage to reach you.
Worst case, you find that anyone connected with your business who travels to the EU or anywhere with a relevant extradition treaty gets arrested. Obviously a reaction that extreme is unlikely, but if perhaps a government thinks you owe them lots of tax money or the personal data you aren't processing according to their wishes relates to some matter of their national security, stranger things have happened.
Your argument reduces to "freedom of speech" == "freedom to take and distribute personal information" (They are not equal).
Your walled gardens cherry on top only highlights the deficiencies that some countries have to protect personal information - Saying this is making the internet into walled gardens is like promoting tax evasion by using Ireland (in this case the US == Ireland, because it is deficient)
> If that were the case, I’d block EU access for any of my domains
These two statements are at odds with each other ...
Is this correct? How's that enforced? Say, I have a company in Poland which sells some goods for a million dollars to another company in Poland. We both have USD accounts in Polish banks and the transfer is between these accounts. How does the money route via the US?
If you've done a USD transfer, it'll most likely be a SWIFT transfer, and you can ask your bank for the SWIFT routing log. You'll most likely see an NYC bank (or NYC branch of your bank) in the middle.
USD is fully convertible https://www.kantox.com/en/glossary/fully-convertible-currenc...
I can "take dollars out of my pocket" and pay you without going through the US no problem
Not to mention that since the USD is a CLS/FCC currency you can perform correspondent banking transactions with it without having any government involved in the process.
There are of course banks whose SWIFT processing is handled by someone else, but they are usually service bureaus or central offices within a conglomerate, not partners in a specific country.
If Polbank (forgive me for the bastardized names) wants to give 1M USD to Bankpolska, they either need to ship cash (which can be done but is expensive or tricky) or have a specific bilateral agreement betwene them (which can be done and is done sometimes, but linking every bank with every other bank bilaterally does not scale), or need some interbank settlement system that will do that, but there's no such system in which they can participate. E.g. there's Fedwire but neither Polbank or Bankpolska can be direct members as far as I understand (they generally are not members; I'm not certain if it's caused by some strict limitation or just practicalities and costs.)
So the standard means is to use 'correspondent banks' e.g. USA banks that do that for them. Polbank might have an USD account with Chase or Citi, and Polbank can ask Chase (via a SWIFT message usually) "hey transfer $1m from our account to Bankpolska, it's cover for a customer deal #1234" - but this means that the transaction "goes through" USA.
Alternatively, multinational banks may have branches in both USA and Poland and so they can be direct participants and settle this directly, however, then it would involve a Fedwire transfer (in USA, subject to USA laws and limitations) between Polbank USA branch and Bankpolska USA branch.
That's standard practice for pretty much every currency. EUR settlement between two American banks usually (not always, there are various options) goes through EU, RUB settlement usually goes through Russia, etc.
If there's a sufficient need, Polish banks could establish an interbank settlement system through which they could transfer USD directly (e.g. similar to the one they have for transfering Polish zloty), but it's a hassle and has costs, so currently they have not done so because for them it's generally not a problem to route all USD payments through USA.
I learned about this from reading the case brought in he UK by the US government to try to stop this happening. I didn't bookmark it, and of course can't find it now.
Not this, but an example of how it can go wrong:
> According to the settlement agreement, BACB actively solicited U.S. dollar business from Sudanese banks and processed the transactions by way of an internal book transfer process that involved a nostro account maintained at a foreign bank (Bank B) located in a country that imports Sudanese-origin oil. (A nostro account is an account a bank holds in a foreign currency in another bank.) Although these transactions were not processed to or through the U.S. financial system, the process to fund BACB’s U.S. dollar nostro account at the foreign bank did involve transactions processed by or through U.S financial institutions in apparent violation of the U.S. economic sanctions.
https://www.nafcu.org/compliance-blog/ofac-dings-london-bank...
CLS currencies and any currency which is fully convertible can be used in transactions without any involvement of the jurisdiction that minted the currency in the first place.
The USD has a huge settlement infrastructure that is completely independent of the US.
Also, could you please share more info? I'm very interested in financial settlement system, especially for USD and EUR, but sadly there's too little public resources.
Doesn't it still need to be involved with USA? I mean, sure, they can use this settlement system to trade between each other independent of Fed, but ultimately the funds in the settlement system have to be stored as reserves in Fed, i.e. in some bank under US jurisdiction. So, after all, US still has control over this new settlement system, but now they can't freeze individual accounts in it, they can only freeze funds in reserve account(s) that this system consist of, potentially affecting many (innocent) parties. Am I right?
Wouldn't that already be quite a step? I don't know who they're selling the data to, but it should at least be possible to prevent them from selling that data to organisations with a European presence, right?
And when you do request them to remove the same, they ask you to provide ID proof. As if one would provide the same to a company which didn't take your consent for the initial profile data either.
I somehow managed to get hold of the CEO's mail ID got mine removed. But I can only imagine what everyone else would have to do when they want to control their web-presence.
Every time I insisted they take it down, right now. Every time they have complied.
There's so many it's basically pulling weeds at this point.
The scarier companies are the ones collecting pictures of your face to train their private facial recognition software.
(Hell I'm hesitant to post HERE because you can't manage the privacy, content or existence of your comments)
Well played. Absolutely legal but totally immoral
...and they are often run by the same people. They use shell companies to basically avoid take-down requests.
Their goals is to make it sufficiently annoying to take down your information, that most people give up. While at the same time removing it (regardless of the process) for anyone that occupies them too much time - because your individual data isn't valuable enough to waste defending against a take-down.
I suspect a (faux) lawyers letter is easier to get these takedowns processed than the calls/emails that most people try.
On the other hand, imagine one day you try to log in to your Twitter/Facebook/whatever-the next-big-thing-is and you can't, because the company has deleted all your data upon your request. You didn't make that request though. Someone else did it, claiming to be you.
It gets even worse when you realize that people can request all the data the company has collected of themselves. What happens when somebody impersonates you and requests all of your data?
You need to have some kind of verification method that leads back to a real identity. Otherwise this can be massively abused. I doubt that even asking for a real ID is enough.
Also check other CCC co-organizers & the political activist sphere.
Don't delete instantly but after X days. Notify owner immediately.
Problem solved.
Yes, you need to prove that you're the data subject matching their records before they should act on your request, whatever that request may be. But uploading a copy of your ID card almost never serves that purpose. See also a bigger comment I wrote elsewhere in this thread with sources and examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23957503
They then asked me to provide my address to confirm my identity. Given that I moved quite frequently, and that I'm now asked to share more personal data with a company who's mishandling my data, I wasn't keen on it.
I mentioned that my full name is globally unique, but they refused. I tried to ask them to share some masked data that I can confirm in full (e.g. "give me a partial address and house number, I can give you the full address"). They refused.
They definitely try to make it hard for you, and to dodge responsibility.
In other words, it's not a bug, it's an accidental feature.
The fact that you’re a old mess means you should be destroyed as a business to allow for newer, more ethical businesses to pop up.
If this is an accidental feature it means you should be accidentally run out of business.
Which part of the process described is illegal? The GDPR explicitly requires[1] controllers to verify subjects' identities in an access request:
The controller should use all reasonable measures to verify the identity of a data subject who requests access, in particular in the context of online services and online identifiers.
"I promise you that I am the only person on earth with this name" doesn't really seem like a sufficiently secure attestation.
But even if we can't go by that, I gave them plenty of options that won't involve me disclosing my entire address history. How on earth am I supposed to give all my address history to a company I never heard of, and who shared my data without my consent...
They didn't come up with any concrete suggestions that won't involve disclosing much more information about myself than I think it's reasonable to require in order to release my own personal info.
I think I was very reasonable, and they weren't. Legally I'm not sure what the situation is. IANAL.
> They then asked me to provide my address to confirm my identity...I wasn't keen on it.
This means one of the primary avenues of verification (possibly the only avenue for some shops) is unavailable. In the scope of GDPR, it's important to remember that they aren't allowed to retain any information you provide for this purpose for any reason other than keeping a record of the request.
> I mentioned that my full name is globally unique, but they refused.
I would have absolutely no way to validate this, because I don't have a comprehensive listing of all 7 billion-odd people in the world. Even if I did, and it was, it's still only a single factor - I doubt you'd want me to release your data to anyone else based only on them knowing your name and that it's unique.
> My name is...easily searchable, linked to my personal domain, and my personal email address on that domain
This can't be relied on, obviously, because there's no identity verification on (most) domain registrations. For all I know, the email address that I have attached to your profile isn't even yours (because we have no preexisting relationship, this has never been proven.)
> I tried to ask them to share some masked data that I can confirm in full...They refused.
I don't think this is actually allowed under GDPR, but assume it is. Let's say you do this twice with two different data controllers - they each provide you with a masked address, but they've masked different parts (because there's no standard).
If you were a malicious actor, you'd now have the subject's complete address and could use that to gain access to the rest of their data. It opens up a significant attack vector.
> How on earth am I supposed to give all my address history to a company I never heard of, and who shared my data without my consent...
Assuming this was someone unknown and not Acxiom, this is a valid point and unfortunately I don't think there's a great answer. In this case, it is Acxiom and you could've quite easily discovered that they're a major corporation and not a random data harvesting shop.
> I think I was very reasonable, and they weren't.
At the end of the day, you're going to have to give them something to prove who you are. If you won't even provide your old addresses, then absent a government-issued ID (which I assume you also would be reticent to provide on the same grounds) I don't know how else I would even attempt to conduct verification.
If they have other details about me, like my phone number or address, they can offer to give me a call, or send a letter to confirm my identity (btw, another company I filed a request with did just that). This won't expose any further details. The fact is, they didn't suggest any reasonable alternative.
> Assuming this was someone unknown and not Acxiom, this is a valid point and unfortunately I don't think there's a great answer. In this case, it is Acxiom and you could've quite easily discovered that they're a major corporation and not a random data harvesting shop.
The fact that they're big is irrelevant. They already shared my data without my explicit consent. They're a company I never ever signed-up for, interacted with in any way, yet they hold data on me. They share it and make profit out of it. I'm definitely not keen on sharing any additional info with a company that aggregates my data as their core business.
I hope you see the huge imbalance here. To get my data I need to jump through hoops and expose even more data about myself (to a data broker which makes money off of it). To sell, aggregate, share and abuse my data without my consent and very likely in violation of GDPR requires no validation that indeed the data belongs to me, nor even an attempt to contact me and ask for consent.
> I think you miss the elephant in the room, which is my email address. That's not something that easy to fake, and I'm pretty darn sure they have it in their database.
As I wrote earlier, the issue here is that because they have no direct relationship with people in their data lake, there's no way for them to know with certainty that the email address associated with a person belongs to that person without some form of additional validation.
You can prove that you have access to that email, but you still need to prove that you're you.
> If they have other details about me, like my phone number or address, they can offer to give me a call, or send a letter to confirm my identity
This brings up the same problems as before: what if the number has been recycled? What if the letter is intercepted by someone living at an old address? Then they've given up the store again. Just because someone else is doing it doesn't mean it's a good idea.
> I hope you see the huge imbalance here.
I do, but you also need to look at it from the other side of the screen. As much as you have a legal interest in accessing your own data, they have a legal interest in ensuring that you are actually the one accessing it.
What you've run into here is one of the other...accidental features of GDPR: it incentivizes companies like Acxiom to be as strict as possible when verifying identities for access requests. They'd much rather be forced to defend the stringency of their access policies than to be strung up by the EC for enabling large-scale identity fraud because they weren't vigilant enough.
That seems a rather optimistic assumption, given the historical way data brokers and those who use them have operated. Plenty of businesses, including some household names, have been caught with their hands in the cookie jar on this one before. No doubt plenty are still doing it and hoping not to get caught or that any penalties will be small enough to be worth it.
As I wrote earlier, the issue here is that because they have no direct relationship with people in their data lake, there's no way for them to know with certainty that the email address associated with a person belongs to that person without some form of additional validation.
There are few ways to know anything with true certainty unless someone in your organisation personally knows someone you're dealing with. It is more about being reasonable.
If an organisation maintaining large amounts of personal data about people without their consent can't find a reasonable way to verify identity and allow the data subjects to exercise their rights, the GDPR-esque solution to the problem is to shut that processing down entirely until the organisation can get its house in order, or permanently if it can't find a way to do that. If that kills the data broker's business model, maybe they shouldn't have been using that business model in the first place, or should have discontinued it when the GDPR came into effect.
Allowing the organisation to deny data subjects their legal rights by hiding behind the verification obligation is at best against the spirit of the law but probably against its letter as well, and certainly justifies a regulatory investigation if it's being done systematically by a big organisation that should know better.
I'm just basing this on my experience working on products in this space and specifically dealing with compliance and "retroactive" consent in the run-up to GDPR implementation. I could definitely be wrong.
> If an organisation maintaining large amounts of personal data about people without their consent can't find a reasonable way to verify identity and allow the data subjects to exercise their rights...
I'm genuinely curious: if you were them, what would you do to resolve this without asking the subject to provide any additional data for verification?
There obviously needs to be something confirmed to verify the identity, but by definition personal data is data about an identifiable subject, so there must be something that can be checked.
If a big data hoarder has personal contact details, attempting to reach someone using those in response to a subject request isn't unreasonable. The hoarder will also have obligations under the GDPR regarding keeping data correct and up-to-date, so they should be in a position to do this in most cases or they're probably in violation already.
Some contact details might be checkable against an external reference to confirm they really are still up-to-date before relying on them, in which case a single attempt using that method might be sufficient.
Otherwise, if you can reach someone via two different and reasonably secure methods associated with their profile then it's probably reasonable to assume they are who they say they are.
If the hoarder doesn't have contact details they can use, then apparently there is some other identifying characteristic of the data subjects that makes it personal data, and in that case presumably you'd have to look at that and see how it could be used for verification.
Well, I definitely didn't. Even if I did give consent for processing my data, sharing with Facebook isn't something I would ever in a million years agree to. An explicit consent should have been specific about it. Evidently Acxiom shared my details with Facebook. But let's leave it aside for now.
> You can prove that you have access to that email, but you still need to prove that you're you.
That's where the huge imbalance lies, isn't it? They link my email, along other details, and they also share my email with Facebook. Yet, when I'm contacting them, from the same email address, then suddenly it's not enough.
But let's say one piece of info isn't enough, they have other pieces? let's match them. Send me a letter, give me a phone call, give me the postal code and ask me to complete the address (or other parts of the address), provide a reasonable way for me to prove my identity. Without effectively asking for my entire address history, or compromising even more data about myself.
> it incentivizes companies like Acxiom to be as strict as possible when verifying identities for access requests. They'd much rather be forced to defend the stringency of their access policies than to be strung up by the EC for enabling large-scale identity fraud because they weren't vigilant enough.
We completely agree on this one. They're as strict as possible when subjects try to exercise their rights, but loose as a cannon when it comes to sharing data, making sure they get real and explicit consent etc.
People may not agree with their stance, but it has yet to be successfully challenged in court to my knowledge.
And there's no recourse besides filing a complaint. Even if I'm legally right, what damage was caused to me that I can seek compensation for? (assuming I go and try to take them to court directly).
As mentioned in my other comment near here, the regulators have started issuing some reasonably substantial fines already.
It's one thing to say something is illegal but if you don't enforce that these firms will be able to operate with impunity.
It's starting to.
https://dataprivacymanager.net/5-biggest-gdpr-fines-so-far-2...
There are 7-8 figure fines already this year, and two 9 figure ones that the UK regulator has given notice on.
The major difference between the two in terms of how the EU makes laws is that directives are the indirect one: individual member states are required to incorporate the provisions into their own legal systems to give them force of law. An EU regulation is the direct equivalent: it carries force of law across all member states immediately. In the case of the GDPR, the UK government has also stated that its provisions will continue here after Brexit and the related transition arrangements.
However, you're right that enforcement will normally be done by an individual member state, because it is typically the national data protection or privacy authority in each state that acts as regulator and has enforcement powers under the GDPR. In theory, there's supposed to be some coordination so one of those regulators will take the lead on any given investigation or enforcement action instead of 28 different organisations all diving in at once, but it doesn't seem to be clear yet how that aspect will work post-Brexit.
Yes, but at the same time you do not want them handing over all your data with zero checks on identity right..?
If they just have my name, now they have a lot of extra information. That's why my government recommends[1] to both watermark the copy and blacken unnecessary fields like the citizen service number and your photo. Such fields don't help them identify you, so you shouldn't share it with them. But imagine actually doing that: the only non-black parts (the parts they can actually match against their database) would be my name. Or in the case of WiFi tracking: nothing. I had to submit ID but really they just looked up whatever MAC address I claimed; I could have claimed my ex girlfriend's MAC address for all they knew. It's also trivial to photoshop a document if all you need to swap around are a few letters.
Identification is completely useless unless done in person when they can actually hold the document against the light and compare it to the European database of what it should look like[2]. (I've never seen anyone do the latter; see also lichtbildausweis[3].) Online, the best you can do is ask to confirm data that you already have about the person. Asking to confirm that same data but on a photoshopped (watermarked and censored) piece of plastic doesn't help anything.
In conclusion, sure I agree that you shouldn't be able to request my data, but the point is about the means rather than the goal. Is providing a censored and watermarked picture of an identity document a means of reaching that goal a better means of reaching that goal than confirming some data like the calendar week during which I was in whatever hotel they have my data from (for example)? That's what GP was offering them: asking to confirm masked data rather than having to provide extra and unnecessary personal data.
[1] https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/identiteitsfraude/v... In Dutch, but see the pictures near the bottom. This is the federal Dutch government's recommendation on how to provide a copy of your identity card.
[2] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/prado/en/search-by-document-...
[3] Original in Dutch: https://dewinter.com/2012/09/24/de-legitimatiecontrole-in-ne... TL;DR: a "lichtbildausweis" is the german word for "photo ID". But how many Dutch people know that? So when you order a photo ID from germany, for example from a website that sells company badges (like, upload your company logo and employee photo and they'll print a plastic card for you), make sure it contains all the fields that you'd generally expect on an ID card, and they'll take it for being a german ID.
It's also odd that you would want to give them your NEW address if they are likely validating against your OLD address.
Why didn't you just give them your OLD address to check against?
Disclaimer: I worked for Acxiom 2007-2009, but not in the data brokerage core business.
I'm a pessimist. You will never remove your personal data. If you get it removed by one company, the others will pop up like mushrooms. Also, from what I've seen, a lot of this information is out-of-date or crap that is just plain wrong.
They have >150K extension users, so they are syncing a massive contact list with personal information that they are then selling via their different products like Prospector [3].
[0] https://connect.clearbit.com
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clearbit-connect-s...
Would you have any proof or evidence supporting that statement?
An interesting exercise: If you have a Facebook account, go to this page[0] or this one[1] and see if you even recognize some of the companies that shared data about you. Not to mention gave explicit consent to sharing your data ...
My list includes companies I never gave consent to (e.g. Amazon, Uber), never signed up for or gave any details to (e.g. Robinhood, Triplebyte) and some I have zero clue about, but the name alone sounds dodgy (Opteo, Mindshare Biddable Digital ...).
[0] https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/?entry_product=info...
[1] https://www.facebook.com/off_facebook_activity/activity_list
As an EU citizen and resident, it's abundantly clear to me that getting a DPA to act in my best interest is mostly hopeless. I'm reminded of the CANSPAM Act where a US citizen can send their spam to the FTC and have them investigate it. Only they never will. All spam sent to the FTC just goes into blackhole, and next to no one is ever prosecuted. Even when it's clear who the spammer is.
I don't think many people realize this fact. That a politically motivated entity controls European's access to privacy restitution, and they're rarely motivated to actually do anything. This makes the GDPR is my eyes primarily a joke. It certainly isn't about securing my rights as an EU citizen. It seems more written to benefit lawyers and others who make money because things are complicated.
If the EU actually cared about my privacy rights they would allow all Europeans access to restitution without mediating it through national agencies. I want to be able to hire a lawyer and directly take abusive firms to court over GDPR violations. I shouldn't have to act via some pre-court mediator who gets to arbitrarily determine if my claims have merit.
> Without prejudice to any available administrative or non-judicial remedy, including the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority pursuant to Article 77, each data subject shall have the right to an effective judicial remedy where he or she considers that his or her rights under this Regulation have been infringed as a result of the processing of his or her personal data in non-compliance with this Regulation.
> Proceedings against a controller or a processor shall be brought before the courts of the Member State where the controller or processor has an establishment. Alternatively, such proceedings may be brought before the courts of the Member State where the data subject has his or her habitual residence, unless the controller or processor is a public authority of a Member State acting in the exercise of its public powers.
I'd made a subject access request because they'd sold my personal email address linked to my business position to random spammers. That association didn't exist in any legitimately accessible data, only in the linkedin data breach.
They won't - that's what relocation means.
> If they have customers in the EU, freeze their bank accounts or sanction their payment processors.
This is comical. The government isn't going to start shutting bank accounts for GDPR violations on small foreign corporations, as if they're smuggling nuclear fuel to Iran. Half the bank accounts in the world would be closed if we were so sensitive to regulations.
I'm sure some of them will get caught, but how long will that take?
Granted, this relies on several levels of the efficient market hypothesis. At some point, it is more efficient to ban poor behavior than to introduce 3rd-order effects that slightly discourage poor behavior.
What will ultimately help with privacy is not leaking out this data in the first place. Push browsers and other such services/devices to stop leaking enormous amounts of information on the user.
That's not to say that GDPR isn't useful. It certainly is, because it stops the big legal businesses from doing it, but it also has the downside of harming European online businesses.
Also, I do remember reading some kind of EU document that this is what they were thinking of.
Rocket Reach and similar companies may be outside the reach of GDPR, however, all the advertisers and global platforms who actually want to target EU customers are within the reach of GDPR so it's illegal for them to buy data from Rocket Reach.
You shouldn't have to guess where your personal data is going, and how it's being used. When the GDPR was first coming into force, I remember getting bombarded with all these notification emails from all these companies coming out of the woodwork that I didn't recognize. But I don't think I've ever been notified by email, SMS, phone or smoke signal since then.
The biggest flaw of the GDPR in my opinion is that it leaves the definition of what's considered personal identifying information with too much wiggle-room for creative interpretation. Maybe it's hard to pin down exactly, but there's often too much emphasis on the word "identifying", as if it's otherwise OK to gather every intimate online detail and build a profile that is a unique identity in and of itself. It's even worse when real-world decisions can be based on it without your knowledge.
I recently had my own rude awakening learning about these data brokers and risk analysis services. The matter itself was relatively trivial, but I didn't realize the extent of this before and the scope of what personal information they're gathering. And it doesn't matter if you think it won't affect you, since you've done nothing wrong. From what I read elsewhere, even exercising fundamental consumer rights may be held against you. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21440526
Note that this is the totally normal approach for Civil Law systems: you define the general principles of what the menace is, and leave it down to the courts to determine whether or not those principles have been violated. In essence, you can view it as every case being decided on the basis of the mischief rule as exists in many Common Law systems.
Which is true and obvious. Why anybody ever thought the GDPR would have teeth outside the EU is beyond me. It was always laughable to me that anybody believed that the EU had made a law that applied to every company in every country in the world.
- They email me some marketing
- I respond with DSAR
- They acknowledge receipt of DSAR
- 6 months pass
- I bump the email thread
- They respond saying they have deleted my data as per my request (I requested access, not deletion)
- I point this out
- They apologise and offer £100 to drop the complaint
- I refuse and complain to ICO
- Obviously nothing happens
GDPR is toothless.
If you've got actual stuff in the EU, it's easy. You get fined under GDPR and if you never show up to argue your side in court or an administrative hearing or whatever, they seize your real estate or bank accounts or physical servers or whatever, and sell it to pay your fines.
If you're US-based, how does it work? Hmm, if you're a modern shop you probably have stuff hosted by big companies, like servers on Amazon's AWS or code on Microsoft's Github. Then the EU could presumably tell those companies to stop hosting your stuff, or they'll become liable for fines as an accessory to the violation. Microsoft and Amazon probably have a lot of bank accounts and physical stuff in the EU that could be seized and sold, so they couldn't simply ignore the fine. They'll probably drop you as a customer immediately once Europe starts making them pay fines, and maybe try to sue you in the US court system to try to recover those costs.
I've never heard of this happening though. So maybe this isn't actually a thing.
If all your stuff is on US soil, and you're careful not to use providers with any European presence, how would they do it? Does the EU have some way to order all European ISP's to blackhole traffic from your company's IP ranges? When your executives come to Europe for vacation or conferences or whatever, could they get hauled off the plane in handcuffs and taken to a European jail over your company's GDPR violations?
Again, I haven't heard of this actually happening. But it seems to me that would be how they'd do it, if they really wanted to prevent overseas companies from simply ignoring GDPR.
If there's no threat of enforcement, why bother with GDPR at all, unless you're planning on having seizable stuff like real estate or bank accounts or physical servers in Europe someday?
and no, those aggregators don't process PII / Personal Data.
Data frugality ftw.
O Tempora O Mores
FWIW I'm really glad that EU courts lack this jurisdiction - any gain from privacy would more than be wiped out from losses to free speech, especially with the extensive history of libel tourism.
Not quite. It applies to people who are "in the Union".
There is a very large overlap between "EU citizens" and people "in the Union", so most of the time there is no need to make the distinction but it is there.
LOL, yes.
I'm sure they also do not meet the legal requirements of North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and many others.
Likewise, various EU corporations do not meet the legal requirements of non-EU places like those. Would he prefer that they did?
Even more interesting, since he expects the US to follow EU law, how does he feel about the EU following US law? The US has that Patriot Act, and lots of EU companies are not compliant. Maybe he should report a few EU companies to the FBI.
Likewise, EU companies should follow US law when they are doing business in the US.
Businesses should not operate in jurisdictions where they can't meet the legal requirements. At the very least, RocketReach should geoblock itself in Europe.
China is the most straightforward example, companies cannot operate unless they basically do it through an - implicitly Chinese state controlled - partner company. China also has a literal Great Firewall monitoring, modifying or stopping all cross-border traffic. So yes, you have to play by their rules if you want access to the market.
US, EU and other western countries also require you to follow their - much more lenient - laws and rules for access to their market, but for now it's rarely enforced through blocking etc. Saudia Arabia, Russia, India, Turkey and other "second world" countries block a lot of services that don't follow their laws or government commands. Same thing: follow da rulez or our market is closed to you.
North Korea has their own exclusive "internet" and blocks all access to the regular internet except for a few highly monitored and controlled locations like universities and government institutes, which are not connected to the NK internet. Not comparable at all.
> Even more interesting, since he expects the US to follow EU law, how does he feel about the EU following US law? The US has that Patriot Act, and lots of EU companies are not compliant.
This is effectively already the case for a large part. All non-china global IaaS companies are US, so everyone has to play by US rules and law. I don't believe for a second that the NSA cannot get the data from the European Google/Amazon/Microsoft data centers.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wholly_foreign-owned_enterpr...
1. https://www.fdichina.com/blog/china-company-registration/ftz...
2. https://www.china-briefing.com/news/entry-strategy-chinas-on...
Asserting a bunch of rights around personal privacy is great, but I've yet to see any compelling evidence that the relevant courts and bureocracies are capable of enforcing the law effectively. EVERYBODY is cheating.
Every time this is brought up on HN, the response is to wait for when the big fines start coming.
It's been two years. They're not coming.
I’m curious how a class action hasn’t been formed around Verizon and Oath’s behaviour?
https://www.enforcementtracker.com/
Over time I expect them to go up further as companies can no longer claim they did not have enough time or were not aware of the law (that never was a defense anyway but DPAs tend to be lenient. So far).
Since the GDPR has come into effect I see in my practice that companies are a lot more aware of their responsibilities towards their users, have better processes and security in place. Is it perfect? Not by a long shot but the improvement is immense and as time goes by and more companies end up setting an example of how things should be done and those that don't end up getting find I expect this trend to continue.
What I like most about the GDPR is that it steers towards compliance, not towards making life of businesses unnecessary harder.
Contrary to you I think the GDPR is a resounding success, the only thing that would make it much better still is if other areas of the world would take up similar legislation so the playing field would level.
From what I can understand of German/Google translate, the third from top:
https://www.enforcementtracker.com/
Link to .pdf:
https://www.ris.bka.gv.at/Dokumente/Dsk/DSBT_20180927_DSB_D5...
Is the Austrian Authorities making a 300 Euro fine to a "common citizen" making "illegal" use of a dashcam (it seems - but I am not sure about it - that the issue is that the car is not - how? - visibly marked as videorecording?).
Anyone more familiar with German (and legal German) can clear the matter/explain?
Again if I got it right a "common user" got stinged because of a dashcam.
The Italian example you refer to is actually a success, like most other ones, I was objecting not to the Law in itself (that is IMHO a good one) but rather on how it is applied, here and there, in spots and seemingly in a random way.
> The private person used a dashcam to make recordings of public road traffic and then published them on YouTube as a compilation.
What a PATHETIC thing this GDPR is. Fully agree that we should admit that GDPR is a massive failure (who would have thought!)
Greetings from a European.
This website contains a list and overview of fines and penalties which data protection authorities within the EU have imposed under the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR, DSGVO). Our aim is to keep this list as up-to-date as possible. Since not all fines are made public, this list can of course never be complete, which is why we appreciate any indication of further GDPR fines and penalties.
The GDPR also has a "pull-in" effect on companies outside the EU that (often illegally) sell personal data because their clients in the EU (the data controllers) have to prove that these companies (their data processors) adhere to the GDPR if they want to do business with them. If a EU company buys personal data from a company outside the EU or sends personal data to that company they are liable if this data gets abused or if the personal data was not acquired in accordance with the GDPR. The whole "privacy shield" mess was about the question whether EU companies can still send personal to the US based on a self-certification process US companies go through (turns out they can't).
Some of the data brokers already feel this pressure and will be forced to change their business models unless they want to lose their clients within the EU. Sure there are still EU companies that do business with these data brokers today, but most of them know that they're exposing themselves to considerable risk and are already looking for alternatives.
All the big European companies I've worked for seemed to put lots of effort into complying.