> I have officials in the EU on the record that IP addresses are deemed personal information and if your business uses AWS and unintentionally passed IP addresses over to any resource in the US, you are technically in violation.
Of course, everybody knows that. You have to have good reasons to store people’s IP addresses (ie security logs, which must be disconnected from the tracking/telemetry system).
> Will you be hanged for this today? Probably not. But all it takes is one negative press cycle for the idiots there to interpret and enforce this as they have shown the willingness to do in the past.
If the regulator finds out that your analytics or recommendation system (which again is not the system where you store logs) is collecting and processing IP addresses without users’ consent, they will ask you to stop. If you don’t they will eventually fine you.
> The point about unelected bureaucrats isn’t the unelected part. It’s the lack of oversight or consequence or clear demarcation of legislative power from the executive.
GDPR has been made/negotiated by the European Parliament (which is elected directly), by the Council of the EU, which is composed by ministers of member states, and by the Commission (whose members are elected by the Parliament and the Council). These are the legislative and executive branches of the EU, not a bunch of unelected bureaucrats.
If you were referring to the regulator, well, all regulator bodies are made of “unelected bureaucrats” by design (that’s why they are referred to as “independent agencies”).
> The bureaucrats have taken it upon themselves to issue multiple specific rules that go over and beyond the text of any law. See the case of the CNIL in France. They had a court ruling around their rules for cookies on Google go against them and they continued to insist that they would enforce said law.
It seems that you are very agitated because the CNIL (some unelected bureaucrats) imposed a blanket ban on cookie walls and then the Council of State (some other unelected bureaucrats) held that such blanket ban could not be imposed. An honest observer would acknowledge that these things happen everyday (the Council of State wouldn’t otherwise exist), the matter is quite complex and that the gist of the matter hasn’t changed: “in order for consent to be freely given, access to services and functionalities must not be made conditional on the consent of a user to the storing of information, or gaining of access to information”. So one may still be fined for a cookie wall.
If what is upsetting you is instead a court case, the only one I could find is the recent 150mln€ fine that Google appealed on jurisdictions grounds and that was upheld, again, by the Council of State.
Either way, I wouldn’t get too agitated about complex court cases in foreign countries thousands of kilometres from my home and whose language I don’t speak.
> Like I said, the EU is an abusive monarchy
I will point to Proposition 7 of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and I won’t indulge you further on this.