So someone having a copy of my data that I wish be removed is trampling on a webmaster's rights? That makes no sense whatsoever.
> Now if you run a website in the EU, any user who signs up to it has control over the contents of your servers
This isn't even true. They have _a tiny bit more_ control of what you can do _with their_ data. That's it.
Buckle up because this type of regulation is only going to happen more frequently and in large part because of your attitude that it is "your" data versus the user's data.
No
> It rightfully belongs to the webmaster.
No, you are completely wrong here. The basic point of the legislation (and other privacy legislation in the EU that came before GDPR) is that a users personal data absolutely does not belong to the someone else once collected.
Your personal info, username, account settings, marketing anayltics, etc. are definitley you're data and you should be free to have them deleted.
The two year old IPs in a server log sitting in backup, or a chance occurrence of your username in a random call stack for some web exception is not your data, and you shouldn't force a business to have to dig through that mound of digital noise to satisfy your deletion needs
And as others have pointed out, no the users don't get to put a leash on webmasters, it just allows the users to retain some degree of control over what the webmasters are allowed to do with personal information about their users. But feel free to argue that it is your moral right to sell user's e-mail addresses to some spammer or whatever.
I'll let that excerpt speak for itself.
And yes, I'm arguing it's anyone's moral right to profit off information voluntarily entered into their website unless a specific agreement was made on the website to the contrary.
Views like this are exactly why we need the GDPR.
I find it utterly ridiculous - disgusting even - that you really believe you have the right to do whatever you want with someone else's personal information. When you provide an email address, physical address, name or other PI, it's with the expectation of it being used for a specific purpose - you should absolutely not give you the right to sell that information to the highest bidder.
This is a bad solution to that problem. So many people's data was stolen that preventing future data from being stolen isn't the most important thing we should be doing. Last I heard it was 150 million people - that's enough that it no longer really matters to the average person if their data is leaked in the future because there's such a high change it already has.
The real solution is to change our systems so that data leaks aren't a big deal. If people didn't ask for a 9 digit number to identify me, as if that's a reasonable thing to keep secret, then it wouldn't matter if everyone in the world knew it. That's the problem with data breaches like this. That's what we should be fixing in response to it.
This isnt even users feelings, this is data that can a:have monetary value and b:can be plain wrong and damage a user.
Do you think that merely by observing data you have right to it? Do you not believe in any IP law? If you agree with any type of IP law then you are just being hypocritical by insisting that webmasters get to take and use whatever data they come across
Yes, with some exceptions for actual copyright and the like.
>Do you not believe in any IP law?
IP law, yes, but I don't feel a user's entries into a website automatically qualify as IP owned by the user. The terms of many websites actually say that whatever you upload to them is owned by the website, unless a prior IP applied to it. I've only ever heard the claim that your name et al. are your inherent IP from "Sovereign Citizens" before.
I don't see a way to declare one bad and not the other unless you're just saying that new things are bad.
Additionally the terms of websites can say whatever they want but it doesn't mean they are legally defensible. I could put into my terms "by finishing this sentence you agree to be enslaved by Lovich LLC" but that doesn't make it happen
The GDPR prohibits me from doing that, and in fact requires that I have the ability to rewrite history by removing that fact if the user who had 192.0.2.7 ever requests it.
Some people, on hearing this, say, 'well, that's fine, you can just store 192.0.2 or 192.0 instead.' That seems pretty silly to me, since the whole point of logs is that they contain full information.
The GDPR tries to do the right thing, but it's broken. Immutable logs are a fundamental right.
It appears to me that as long as you don't use the logs for nefarious purposes you'd at least have legitimate interest in processing them (including the IP addresses), and so could keep them. This is the stance I am taking with respect to my personal webserver (together with a time limit after which logs are deleted); if a regulatory body informs me to change my approach, I'll gladly adapt.
Note also that IP addresses can be personal data, but do not have to be. Most claims here seem to relate to a ruling, where the IP address was deemed personal data in the hands of an ISP, who would be able to resolve it to a real person [1]. If you hold an IP address, but can't connect it to a real person (e.g. by having legal means to convince the ISP to give you that name based on the address), then it seems the IP address would not even be personal data in the first place. In the particularly ruling, the operator of the webserver was the German government, which presumably has more legal power to make an ISP turn over identifying data on a customer than a random website would have.
In any case, I hope some more clarity about this will emerge soon. But what you are talking about here would at best be a borderline infraction (and probably just be covered under legitimate interest). OTOH, what the person starting this thread had in mind seems to be that all the data he might collect on his users is fair game to do with as he pleases.
[1] https://www.whitecase.com/publications/alert/court-confirms-...
No it doesn't.
> and in fact requires that I have the ability to rewrite history by removing that fact if the user who had 192.0.2.7 ever requests it.
No it doesn't.
I absolutely agree. If you feel a law is wrong, it is your absolute right to say so and demand change. This is the basis of all law and civilisation. The consensus of what is right-or-wrong is what makes a society.
Go for it.
If it is a fundamental right, how far does it go? Should I be able to sue you for watching me walk in a public place? Photographing me? Video taping me? What about a privately owned but still public place?
There are a lot of questions here that I think people tend to skip over about users owning information about them and being able to control it.
Making some observations out your window of cars passing by is something no one ever had a problem with. Taking down every single identifier you could and coordinating with others to track that person, for a profit, is something that would not be kosher in meat space.
Why this different just because it's on a computer?
Keeping detailed information about everyone that enters your store isn't illegal, as far as I know. Especially not information that is gained from observation (what color shirt they're wearing, their IP address) and information that is submitted willingly (their name given for a reservation at a restaurant, their username).
That's the whole point of the law is to say it's illegal, the same way laws made stalking people illegal
In this case, a lot of people base their argument on a fundamental right to privacy which is not generally accepted by everyone and therefore it has to be explained because it's an important part of the discussion.
Also, no one who actually does this stuff for a living uses the term "webmaster".
Have I been hallucinating my workplace this whole time?
What? Because you just decided that it does?
It's people like you why we need GDPR-like laws. I'm curious, what's your stance on the Equifax data breach? They had data that belongs to them and they could do with and treat it as they pleased, right?
I think most people agree that unless those pictures are gathered with very specific consent, subject to many restrictions, they are not "my data". This is obviously an extreme example, but the reasoning extends to more data that is considered sensitive. The point being that "data ownership" is a complicated issue.
Pictures probably aren't a good example because they are covered by intellectual property laws.
Months later, I discover that I can sell my stock of credit card information on the darknet for some nice extra income.
Should I be allowed to do that? What if it weren't credit card details but just postal addresses?
If you think they might be used illegally, I believe there are already laws to charge you with that relate to facilitating a crime.
If you don't think they will be used illegally, then what's the harm in selling them to someone else?
Nobody likes getting a lot of junk mail, but it's not the end of the world. I actually got my first credit card from a pre-approved offer found in junk mail.
You are saying that's a bad thing?
Services that require you to sign up, should provide the possibility for users to look at, modify and delete their user data - that's all. Where's the problem?
The problem is that there's no justification for having the right to coerce other people just because they have information you gave them. If users enter names into your website, you're not allowed to run a statistical analysis of what names are most common on your website without asking. If people named Jane are more likely to eat ice cream, you can't target ice cream ads at them and help keep your site free, without asking them. Worse than just this kind of coercion of what you're not allowed to do, users can coerce you into taking time out of your day to expunge records about them. It's all entirely backwards.
If forcing low-earning EU citizens off the internet because every website requires a subscription is a social good to you, then sure, it's a long term benefit.
Even if it would all be a net benefit, why is it ok for all of these companies to be so misleading about it. No one out a simple EULA, for what is happening with the data. Hell half the agreements just say that the companies can do whatever with the data, but an average person does not have the ability to parse the output of the legal teams of every company they interact with every day. The only way this could get even close to an equal footing between users and companies is if every single person was a lawyer
For example, with small numbers for the argument's sake, say in 2000 there were 5 good webpages and 4 bad webpages added to the internet every day. Now there are 10 good webpages and 50 bad webpages added every day. That would mean we're getting more good information per day than before, but the signal to noise ratio has gotten worse, as you said.
For all intents and purposes the information doesn't exist if you can't find it, you can only find information as a certain rate, and a larger and larger chunk of that information bandwidth every day is bad information. The practical result is that the rate of good information someone has access to has decreased even if the total system has a nominally higher rate
Apart from the fact that people named Jane aren't more likely to eat ice cream, you seem to criticize that it gets harder to target ads?
Oh no, that's a real pity. Oh no, poor webmasters.
Why are the rights of people who own websites less important to you than the rights of other people?
Regardless, you might not still be saying this once half the websites smaller than Google become subscription-based in the EU or just block the EU altogether.
What you're describing is a good thing. If you're going to treat my data like an almost stale slice of pie selling it off cheap to anyone who will buy it - Please do block my access!
They don't have that right. GDPR only applies to business. If you mean you wrote it in your house for some business reason then yeah they have the right to know you've done so and why and the right to ask you to remove it if you don't need to have that information.
In no situation do they have the right to come into your house. That's a touch too far into the absurd.
In a society where the webmasters have shown that they can't uphold their duty to secure PII (or any kind of data really), as evidenced by ~monthly high-profile data leaks, they deserve to be restricted in their "rights to the fruits of their labor".
Further, the US law is based on risks of heavy punishments but few regulations, while the law in many parts of Europe is based on strict regulations but less high fines. It looks like the EU has too many rules, but that is a subject of perspective.
Problem here: The internet gives a shit about borders and society.
Every business owner here who would complain about how the GPDR is taking their rights to their personally earned data away would be the same people who launch a lawsuit because one of their competitior's products had a typeface that was vaguely similar to theirs
There are regular people here, they just don't go starting businesses that have abusing their customers as a business model because they couldn't sleep at night if they did that
Surely anyone who disagrees with your feelings on this matter must be a sociopath, though.
The GDPR didn't arise out of some feeling that companies we're making too much money. It arose out of the fact that the industry refused to self regulate. They were given years to do this and the standard operating procedure for security around data right now is to lol because who cares if you have a breach, that's a problem for the people you harvested data from, not you.
The bad side effects from this data harvesting are called negative externalities. A similar set of negative externalities is pollution.
Do you think it's immoral for regulations to make certain business model that rely on dumping poison into the water or air unprofitable, just because those companies could have made some money if only they could do what they liked regardless of the harm to others?
Which is why you are perfectly capable of giving consent to other websites to do that.
"Surely anyone who disagrees with your feelings on this matter must be a sociopath, though."
No, just those who insist on a "take it or leave it" approach.
Implying that the majority of user's wouldn't just instantly click the largest button that says "make this annoying wall of legal text go away" whether that is agreeing to tracking or not?
While the inability to target ads based on data about you and your search history searches removes some amount of advertising income. Websites would still be allowed to show ads, and I would imagine that those ads can be specific to the article currently being viewed.
This is exactly how conventional TV advertising works, just because you don't know the gender, race, political views and entire life story of a website user, doesn't mean you can't get almost the same effect. You can target ads in general at specific content and hit most of the correct users anyway rather than targeting specific users and the content they have viewed in the past.
https://www.emarketer.com/Article/Behavioral-Targeting-Doubl...
Sociopath is a tough word, but in the original non insulting meaning of deviation from the common society, I think the word is right.
We still do. Nothing has changed on that front.
"Now if you run a website in the EU, any user who signs up to it has control over the contents of your servers and you have to ask in extremely specific detail to do anything with some of that content, and that "consent" can be revoked at any time."
As it should have been from the beginning. Having the standard being that the company hoovers up all your data all the time without telling you what they're doing with it or why they need it was a terrible, terrible thing.
"The EU has shot themselves in the foot and more and more companies are going to refuse to do business with them because of it."
I highly doubt it.
We used to live in a society where webmasters' rights to the fruits of their labor weren't trampled on by inane regulation (to this degree at least). Now if you run a website in the EU, any user who signs up to it has control over the contents of your servers and you have to ask in extremely specific detail to do anything with some of that content, and that "consent" can be revoked at any time.
The EU has shot themselves in the foot and more and more companies are going to refuse to do business with them because of it.