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Comment by ill_pigeon | Hacker News Reader

You are going to get completely fucked by GDPR if you're scraping and rehosting people's personal data. This is not cool at all.

I recommend you shut this down immediately and email everyone on the list to apologise.

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GDPR has no bite

I guess bite is relative. But this site has been a great resource to see what fines have been handed out https://www.enforcementtracker.com/

I don't believe that's true. Specifically, they say they are republishing public lists that people have signed up for, for largely the same purpose ("letting people know that I've been laid off"), which is in the interest of the subject. They should be notifying the people on the list, but there's nothing intrinsically wrong with what they're doing.

Luckily the GDPR is a bit more specific than "it was public somewhere in the first place".

Correct. It requires that they published it, clearly with the intent of making it public, and for purposes similar to what it is being re-used for. I believe I mentioned that.

It is more specific than that. Having published it somewhere else for similar purposes is not enough.

You have to obtain explicit, demonstrable consent and offer a way for the subject to withdraw that consent (in this case they don't even know about it! This site collected and showed their information without letting them know)

This is explicit in article 7: https://gdpr.eu/article-7-how-to-get-consent-to-collect-pers...

I'm not a lawyer so I'm not going to express the same perfect self-confidence that you appear to have, but article 7 only applies if your use of the data is based on consent in the first place - which is only one of the options for legal justification of processing under article 6.

Of course, each member state is free to create exceptions to all of those articles for anything they consider journalism, which makes it even harder to make absolutely certain pronouncements on the legality of of any specific work which might fall under that category, but let's not get too complicated. Suffice to say that I think a court case on the question would be longer and less straightforward than you appear to think.

The good old shotgun argument fallacy. Sure, there are other conditions in there. Do you think any of them specifically applies?

> each member state is free to create exceptions to all of those articles for anything they consider journalism

Are you claiming that this is journalism?

Yes, I do think one of them applies. 10 points if you can figure out which one.

Are you claiming that this isn't journalism? Under which member state definition?

> Yes, I do think one of them applies. 10 points if you can figure out which one.

Unfortunately I am not convinced by the argument you refuse to say. Your way of debating is unconventional, I will give you that.

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