If I tell you that the maximum sentence in the UK for possession of marijuana is 5 years in prison or an unlimited fine, are you going to tell me that everybody who's ever been caught with marijuana has been thrown in prison for half a decade or bankrupted?

No, in fact, most people get served with nothing more than a formal caution or a £90 fine. This is normal - this is how the law works in this country. Anyone who doesn't understand this hasn't even been paying attention to the lowest-common-denominator newspapers, which are constantly screeching about how people usually don't get anything close to maximum sentencing.

For many, that lawyer for an afternoon is an additional $1000 out of packet expense on a side project website that wasn't profitable to begin with.

Well then your “side project website” is unsustainable.

It’s not complex - we don’t let people away with flouting regulation because it’s burdensome. “It would make me unprofitable” is not a valid reason to ignore health and safety laws, or hygiene laws.

“I just want to run a food truck as a side project but not care about making people sick or not” is obviously ludicrous. Why is personal data somehow fair game?

Why are you assuming that everything on the internet must be a revenue producing business?

Someone doing it for love or passion is now faced with GDPR compliance and the risks and hassle that come with it.

I am assuming no such thing.

Just because you are not making revenue doesn’t mean that you don’t have to abide by regulation. The GDPR is intended to solve a very real and present issue; if you run a side project that deals with personal data, then the fact that it makes no money doesn’t mean that your mistreatment of personal data isn’t harmful!

I'd rather block all EU IPs than bother to break working technology that is operated and maintained freely.

How do you revoke PII from a distributed information system, like anything using a blockchain or distributed version control? You don't.

You can. You just need to think about it and have the correct controls in place.

If you choose to block all EU IPs instead of implementing the most basic data security and retention policies, then it’s for the best that EU users are not able to use your compromised service.

You cannot force peers of any decentralized distributed system to forget data. They can pretend to and appear as compliant peers and yet retain the data.

Then why are you storing PII on them?

Have you ever used git and supplied a username and email as your author? That's PII in a distributed service that cannot be revoked.

That is also PII being used for the purpose it was collected for (identifying a contributor) and I believe falls under Art.6(1)(f) of the GDPR. You would likely have a hard time convincing anybody that you can apply the right to be forgotten to a git repo - especially as that particular processing can be argued to not be requiring consent once you have submitted your commits.

The author details are not necessary for the core function of git; the change itself does not need the PII. Moreover, my concern is general for when PII is in such a distributed system; git is just one example of many.

I've always felt that git is poorly designed for that reason. At the very least, there should be an "identity block" that commits etc point into, rather than embedding names, emails, and other identity information into immutable commits. Under GDPR, that's how it would've been designed in the first place. Of course, this'll never happen without a complete fork of git.

Once you've got that sorted and you can change/remove identity information, the likes of GitHub have no issue so long as they have GDPR-compliant contracts with any business partners who can access git repos. Obviously, anyone using GitHub who decides to store all identity data forever is, generally speaking, not GitHub's problem, same as someone who noted down the names of all their friends on Facebook isn't Facebook's problem.

> I've always felt that git is poorly designed for that reason. At the very least, there should be an "identity block" that commits etc point into, rather than embedding names, emails, and other identity information into immutable commits.

Misuse of git isn't a problem inherent to git.

Putting your name and email into commits is the default behaviour of git, and git will not work until you do so. This is design, not misuse.

No, putting the name and email you give it, if you give it one, is by design.

So the GDPR is entirely irrelevant because we could just give fake details to companies? And giving correct details to anyone, ever, is in fact “misuse”? That’s not how the law works, nor is it how it should work.

This was specifically about git. However, it does appear that you need to at least provide a user identifier for git. I can understand why that would be useful in a distributed system. It could be opaque identifier, but you're points taken in this case.

This was about git in the context of the GDPR, so a company (say, a git hosting provider) is by definition involved. If you're sending commits to other private developers in some way that doesn't involve a company storing the data, the right to be forgotten/right for records to be corrected/etc in the GDPR is irrelevant in the first place.

Can you explain how they managed to cope under the twenty or so years of things like data protection law or eg PECR?

Can you explain why they can cope with PECR but can't cope with GDPR?

Laws that are stupid and not widely enforced because they are stupid are damaging to the entire concept of law. Particularly if they can hang over like a sword of Damocles if you piss off the wrong people.

This is getting silly.

The law will be enforced, just as current data protection is.

The law can be enforced without every case attracting the maximum penalty. That's why nearly every law has a range of penalties.

Accidental and minor breaches can attract a minor penalty or a letter asking you try harder. Wilful and repeated breaches affecting many customers will attract harsher penalties.

Same goes for speeding offences - go 40 in a 30 limit, get a fixed penalty ticket. go 140 with the GoPro race footage of you and your buddy posted to twitter expect a much larger fine and a driving ban.

In neither instance is it not enforced, or damaging to the concept of law.

I don't think that people like you and people like me will ever agree in these discussions because you look at statistics and I look at possibilities.

What @megaman22 is saying fully matches my experience as an Eastern European -- piss off the wrong people and the law will fall on you with its full might. Some people would really love to make an example out of you if you give them the chance. And I don't think that only applies to E.E. but have no data either way, it's just an observation from news and hearsay from affected people around here.

I fully support the GDPR and I'll do my utmost to comply with it even for hobby projects.

That was never something I disputed in my root comment that spawned this big sub-thread.

What I said and will continue saying is -- laws like these open even more doors for legal trolls, big players and nasty competitors to exhaust you out of business. The fact that it doesn't happen on a massive scale in my eyes means nothing; or rather, it means that agents used as an example to scare off others isn't something that's done often because usually just a few lawsuits and their aftermath are plenty enough for those many others to get the message.

So IMO using statistics here is not a strong enough argument. I am not trying to alter your thinking. We actually agree on most points but I simply can't agree that past statistics are a good proof that the new law won't be used in a more heavy-handed manner than originally intended.

To me, that remains to be seen yet and none of us can claim with certainty that what seems likely to them will materialize.

Almost missed this thanks to the incorrectly flagged message up thread.

> I don't think that people like you and people like me will ever agree in these discussions because you look at statistics and I look at possibilities.

You may be right in our chances of agreement!

I see a judiciary separate from state which is more than happy to put politicians back in their box when they introduce bad or overreaching law. Governments of all colours complain about the judiciary and Lords here in the UK - which I see as proof that the separation basically still works. I see data protection bodies that are separate from government and politics. I see occasional stories of record fines or breaches from mainly Western Europe and talk to friends and conclude small business and solo developers are not being fined or trolled into oblivion in nearby countries either. Yet EU DPA is most of what GDPR is with smaller maximum fines. Why isn't the disaster scenario you foresee already happening with current DPA and other laws? Why are so few fined for breaches and only the most extreme cases getting fines?

I'm less aware of justice systems further east and yes it's obvious that former Soviet bloc are going to be rightly more sensitive to and concerned about corruption. I'm also not aware how successfully that's been left behind from adopting EU laws and years of membership. That said, reading the pieces that turn up on HN it seems that the US is the one with problems of corruption in the justice system currently. No doubt that's also unrepresentative thanks to what's being shared about a vast nation.

So, the legal trolls - it's going to be registrars and data protection bodies bringing cases or seeking sanctions. Just like happens with current DPA. This does not appear to be akin, or anywhere near, the US DMCA where large media companies massively abuse takedowns via automated software and triggering numerous trivial errors. I don't see the scope to exhaust someone out of business - yet it's clearly easy with DMCA. There's nothing a Sony can abuse to pick on a little guy with GDPR - they can report me to the registrar.

You're right that it remains to be seen, but I sincerely doubt our data protection bodies are suddenly going to break out thumb screws and bring orders of magnitude more cases when they've kept fines for the final, extreme, and rare sanction til now.

I honestly expect that just as I feel more should have attracted fines and sanctions under DPA I'll find that GDPR is also being too lightly applied. We'll see. I've been wrong on the internet before. :)

The speed limit analogy is terrible. Or maybe perfect, for my point.

Because speed limits are not enforced, everyone goes somewhere between 5 and 15 mph over, all the time. But catch a pissy cop, or one in a town that uses speed traps as a revenue source, and you can get pinched for hundreds of dollars arbitrarily. Yeah, the jackhole that burns tire at 110 past a school-zone is most likely to get pinched, but almost everyone on the road could.

>Because speed limits are not enforced

and yet

> But catch a pissy cop, or one in a town that uses speed traps as a revenue source, and you can get pinched for hundreds of dollars arbitrarily.

Sounds like enforcement to me.

The solution is also simple. Don't drive over. I don't do it. If the sign says "50 kph", I drive "50 kph" and not more.

Driving over is entirely voluntarily ignoring the limitation set by the law so don't go and be all surprised when somebody CAN FINE YOU FOR THAT.