Regulators are not enemies. Regulators are the enemies of established companies, and operate in favour of civil society as civil servants: they are subject to oversight, and are imposed to create oversight over entities who are not equilibriating in favour of wider society. They are anti monopolist.
Your response is really strange in this regard. Freedom of information is not an absolute. You have a right to privacy as an individual. If you hold certain digital assets like domain names, you are losing some of that privacy to have a WHOIS record, and GDPR is restoring some of it. If you browse web pages and entities hold onto your cookies and create value by integrating over sets of cookies at different websites GDPR is returning to you, the individual, some control over that.
To use an analogy: if you love to travel the world but keep getting sick from preventable infectious diseases, the solution is to buy bottled water, mosquito repellent, and vaccinations, not stop traveling all together.
Subject to oversight? Have you EVER heard of a French civil servant being fired? It's as rare as a baseball game in Paris.
A bumpy ride from early agriculture, where people died of sickness and war all the time, to the relatively stable modern era of great wonders we all take for granted - hot water, long-lasting food of greater variety than even kings had just a hundred years ago, of powerful medicine and safe surgeries, of wash machines and air travel and the Internet.
All of that built on accumulation of knowledge and stabilization of societies, in which regulators always played a crucial role.
The history books do not paint the picture that "regulators are enemies". You just have to focus less on kings and wars, and more on how a society looked and lived in any given era, and why.
Are you referring to the Data Protection Officer (DPO) requirement?
I believe this is the relevant article: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-37-gdpr/
If I understand correctly, you only need to appoint a DPO in cases where you are either a public entity (you are not) or in cases where your site requires "regular and systematic monitoring of data subjects on a large scale", or in a couple of other special cases where you process extremely sensitive data.
Presumably you aren't doing that on "your" forum/webpage, so you don't need to appoint a DPO.
I think you are making a bit of a storm in a teacup here.
> the identity and the contact details of the controller and, where applicable, of the controller’s representative;
See, the main question here is which identity it is that must be disclosed. The definition in article 4.7 has this to say:
> ‘controller’ means the natural or legal person, public authority, agency or other body which, alone or jointly with others, determines the purposes and means of the processing of personal data; where the purposes and means of such processing are determined by Union or Member State law, the controller or the specific criteria for its nomination may be provided for by Union or Member State law;
What exactly falls under "other body" may be important here. What it does not say is that it must be a legal person.
Let us say that you have a forum on omgweirdfetishes.eu. You may say that the controller is The OMG Weird Fetishes Forum. Now it may be arguable that in itself counts as "other body", but generally there's the concept of "Unincorporated Association" which is just any group of people with a common purpose, it would be hard to argue that that doesn't fall under the "other body". In some countries, e.g. Denmark, an unincorporated association is even recognized as a legal entity in its own right.
So say that "The OMG Weird Fetishes Forum is driven by The OMG Weird Fetishes Forum Association. The members of the The OMG Weird Fetishes Forum Association consists of the users of The OMG Weird Fetishes Forum", and then identify the data controller as "The OMG Weird Fetishes Forum Association, contact details: [email protected]"
ps -- if you want not to be required to disclose anything under the GDPR, don't collect any personal data. No ips, usernames, access logs, etc.
So, even in the boring world of small websites, you have to comply.
Okay, so then the only requirement of GDPR is that you must make the newsletter opt-in rather than opt-out and you must make the unsubscribe process as easy as the subscribe process.
This is indeed a problem if you run Mailman, which has a somewhat annoying unsubscribe process and which does not have the funding[1] to address this.
This is fundamentally dangerous. Once we are all lawbreakers all the time, it creates a powerful tool for oppression and using the law to harass and silence political opponents.
If this really matters to you, and you care about doing more than signaling to others of your ideological persuasion, you need to offer more and better. Slippery slope is too often the lazy fallacy, and not a real case against something. How does this law as written and likely enforced do all of the bad things claimed here?
It’s really hardcore levels of bullshit being employed in this thread to make a big scary mountain out of a molehill.
Additionally, while the remedy for this crime is a fine, the remedy for not paying the fine is prison.
This new reg to me is just bewildering however - not even allowing media sources to opt out of it? That just makes no sense to me and comes off as an attempt to destroy smaller / independent outlets. Hopefully it dies on the vine.
Many companies including Twillo and Delta have rolled out their tracking controls behind feature flags. If you decide that you'd rather not be tracked they make you stare at a spinner for ~100 seconds while your privacy settings are "being applied".
Keeping privacy as inconvenient as possible is big business.
To some extent, this risks running afoul of GDPR and getting hit with a big fine. But no doubt companies will try to find the sweet spot of being as annoying as possible while still being technically compliant.
"The information was on display on Alpha Centauri for at least 20 years".
I.e. if they make a GDPR request put them on the waiting line with rest of customers. Press 1 for account related matter, Press 2 for account information, please enter your account number. Please enter your account number to confirm. Press 3 for privacy related information. Press 4 for information regarding GDPR. Please enter account information. Please verify account number. Redirecting to customer support. Please press 9 to continue. Please press 2 for verifying you are EU citizen. Enter verification data.
This sounds plausible but do you have evidence that it is actually true?
An equally plausible reason for the proposed change is that European leaders see what media consolidation leads too. Too many people relying on too few sources for information. Perhaps this legislation is an ill thought out way to try to counteract the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica controversy.
Newspapers, and magazines are dying. They are no longer able to do the sort of investigative journalism like in the past. Consolidation has led to a degradation of quality and has caused too few people to control too much information. Witness the shenanigans of Sinclair Broadcasting recently.
I don't know the merits of the legislation in question but without evidence it's a hard sell to ascribe its passing to what you claim.
We used to be able to put a website online, gather emails to send newsletters, offer services to our users, etc without any help from the government. Now, every time I put a new website online I have to fill pages of pages with stupid policies and I know I'm not even fully compliant because honestly it's impossible to really be since it's all about how it's interpreted by the current bureaucrat. These kind of laws don't deserve a place in Europe.
You need people to be able to be naturally compliant, so that they can promote their stuff wihout being scared of persecution if they say something the government doesn't like. Today you don't make a website and say controversial stuff, otherwise you know that when the government will notice it will uses the broad interpretations that stupid laws like the cookie law or GPDR give them to drag you into court and destroy you. By government of course I mean bureaucrats, political figures and your bigger competitors.
These kind of laws, like the GDPR, where they say "we will use them for good, don't worry, we will ony use them on big companies" are those that freedom-minded people should be mostly scared about. Of course the proposal in OP is much worse and makes no sense.
That argument works against things like data retention laws (the new regime may find 'new uses' for data already retained) but if anything, GDPR discourages data retention