I am not sure I can fully follow you here.
If implementers accepted that they only collect what is absolutely necessary and they delete what the they are not legally requited to keep things would be much easier.
Problems start when the business model is that customers'/users' data is our product/an asset and we somehow try the find the minimum possible implementation that just meets the requirements of the law while still using all loopholes it might possibly leave.
I agree that the law is not very clear for how you should code it. Nor very detailed what you can do with a certain piece of data. So it depends on your approach: If you take a conservative approach that if in doubt, we don't keep the data it suddenly gets much clearer. If you start fiddling maybe I could still do it if we did it like this and that you end up in endless work.
And of course if you have an existing system that never had the requirement of deleting anything there is a lot of work. But the law has been in force for 2 years, so businesses that wake up now when the transition period has ended it can be a mess.
>Laws designed that way almost never actually accomplish what they set out to do.
How would you have written the law? Do you have counter-examples of laws being written so clearly that you could recommend them?
The key point really is: Many business models and practices on the internet are incompatible with the spirit of GDPR. It's a fundamental right that the users own their data and businesses are not allowed to do with it whatever they want.
Lawmakers did not want it write it that so clearly, because lobbyists would not have accepted it. And business owners still don't want to accept any suich fundamental right. So complaining about the law being too complicated is somewhat canting.
Yeah, it might be getting harder making a startup working on personally-identifiable data - even if it's not doing anything shady. But it's also hard to make a food or healthcare startup; you can't just "move fast and break things" there either. In EU, PII were finally granted the status of something actually important.
As for startups that depend on abusing user data, I'm very happy they have problems now.
- personal data (car) are any data that have potential identifying a person
- person owns its data (car). You cant buy them (well this part is different than the car), you cant steal them, you cant sell them, but you can borrow them from. But for that you need to ask (consent), where it is not allowed to trick the owner to give them to you, whithout beeing fully aware what was borrowed and why. And if you are borrowing the data for someone else, you need to ask about that too. And tell when you will return it.
- it is immature and unfair to play grumpy if someone doesn't want to allow to use its data. Or try to force/blackmail them from him. So its not allowed to do that (noyb.eu)
- once you borrow the data (like property, envision a car), behave acordingly, owner can demand them back, demand to see them, demand to know what you are doing with them and if stolen it is completely normal to tell them about that. And if they were stolen due to your fault (leaving keys in a car), they might demand to be compensated. Same goes if you misuse them (let me put some fertiliziers on back seat, forget to return them, giving it to all your friends without asking,...)
- if the data owner asks you to do something that requires his data ("hey, can you please take my car and bring me icecream from the store") you don't need to ask for data, it is expected you can have them.
Did I forget something? I consider it simple, as long as you try to stay genuinly respecting to other persons ownership. Just think about borrowing your car or borrowing car from your best friend and you wont go far wrong.
if yoi tell me your birthday how can i forget it?
if you borrow me a car i have something i can return...
That's not really relevant. GDPR doesn't ask people to forget things out of their minds.
So let's rephrase to a more relevant example:
> if yoi provide me your birthday on a web form and I put it in a database how can i forget it?
This now becomes relevant, and easy do answer. You delete it.
Ask any husband.
Joking aside, if the memory is on a computer system, as opposed to a person, you can, you know, just delete it.
Obviously, removing the commit would break git's ability to sign any hashes for that repository after that point…
And thinking it through a bit more, what about the companies that use v8? Could I ask my regulator to get Joyent to remove it from their systems? I'm sure they have copies…
You entirely missed the point of my hypothetical, which was about immutable data structures like git employs.
As it turns out, our business also uses a git-like hash-chained commit log for our normal database. Deleting old entries would thus violate the integrity of our database. Is that now illegal under the GDPR?
Law has nuance and cases (and corner cases), it's not some strict predicate.
But the laws regarding it are not clear for an actual operating business. Instead of being simple and straightforward to implement, they are an ambiguous mess that are wasteful and misplaced. Laws designed that way almost never actually accomplish what they set out to do.