Comment by brookst | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brookst | Hacker News Reader

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I partly agree but feel you’ve conflated a few things:

- Laws are best when abstract. This is true. Laws work best when they cover a class of behavior, not specific behaviors.

- Requiring informed consent is good. This I disagree with with because it is a hard to measure outcome. Abstract, yes, but to the point where nobody knows what it means. The only way to meet this in spirit is to go so far overboard that nobody can ever say you didn’t try hard enough.

- Mandating that huge populations spend time to make informed case by case decisions. This is like mandating pi=3. As soon as this became the goal the whole enterprise was doomed. The only way this happens is with notaries and witnesses , which is far too heavy a burden for visiting a website.

The whole thing is noble intent, but disproportionate to the problem and not aligned with the putative goals.

Regulation can be good, and it should be abstract, but it cannot mandate abstract outcomes. Imagine if speed limit signs said “speed limit: optimized balance of reduced time to destination and net cost of carbon emissions and amortized risk of accidents”

I’d say the ability to have speed limits is the regulation. How it’s implemented vary depending on the road. Regulations should be abstract so that the implementation can be sensible and adaptive to the context.

And everyone knows what “informed consent to tracking”. If you’re building something, you know when you intrude on your users’ privacy. But everyone chose forgiveness instead of permission, and now I throwing a fit when the latter is required.

> nobody knows what it means

The definition of consent is provided here. [0] There are clear application guidelines. To me it takes being intentionally obtuse or malicious in the interpretation when reading the text to come to the conclusion "I don't know what it means so I'll do the thing that benefits me".

Imagine blowing through a stop sign and trying to explain that you don't know what it means, the Earth is moving so you could never really be in compliance. You're not wrong but it's clear that your incompliance doesn't come from a place of honest misunderstanding.

> Mandating that huge populations spend time to make informed case by case decisions

It's mandating that the user is given the tools to provide informed consent, not that they must use them properly. If you need to know what it means, the text is clear. If not and never needed to read it, it's easy to conclude it's hard, impossible even.

[0] https://gdpr.eu/article-4-definitions/#:~:text=%E2%80%98-,co...

Sure I find it reasonable to disagree on these points.

I personally find informed consent to be a very desirable thing, because it aims at the goal of legislation, not at the means. If you think that citizens cannot, should not, or should not be required to profoundly understand what is happening to them in digital contexts, that's a specific point of view. From this you evaluate the trade-offs.

My personal (humanistic) perspective is that a profound understanding and practical control over our digital lives are the prerequisite for dignity, which is the ultimate goal of a state.

That's really well put.

> If you think that citizens cannot, should not, or should not be required to profoundly understand what is happening to them in digital contexts, that's a specific point of view.

Yes, that is what I believe. Most especially the "required" word. I do believe they should be allowed, empowered, encouraged, and enabled to understand those things, but I do not think it is a good requirement.

IMO people also have a right to not care about this. At their peril, perhaps, but who am I to tell someone that they may not use digital tools unless they commit to this understanding?

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