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Comment by narag | Hacker News Reader

You don't need to write the perfect law. Just write a law that has more or less the intended effect.

Imagine you write a program to do something and it doesn't work at all as expected and at the same time it causes endless annoyance to users.

A law is very similar to a program. It's software for the society. It didn't work and the authors are blaming everybody except themselves.

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Of course the politicians share a portion of the blame, but we cannot ignore the fact that websites are just playing the blame game as well.

We’re also seeing tracking despite the lack of user consent as well. This could be a fluke but when I make anonymous search on website and switch to another, I’m seeing the product I have just searched in the ads. With all the tracking disabled I mind you.

But, but... we're the good guys, we're just fighting those evil advertisers!

I don't know if they'll finally find a way to control the spying, but how many years have passed since they made the law?

The difference between a law an a program is that the computer isn't a malicious actor trying to do everything in it's power to subvert the law. A law is nothing like a program, because a computer will do nothing without a program, but societies do all sorts of things regardless of laws.

The world a program works in and the computer it runs on are often very malicious, or they sure act like they are. Not to talk about users, some are pure evil :-)

We put a lot of safeguards, exception handling and all kind of measures to control errors.

> You don't need to write the perfect law. Just write a law that has more or less the intended effect.

What is the unintended consequence of GDPR?

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