The legislation, at least the one coming from Brussels, is nearly always reasonable in scope, extent, impacts, penalties, and tends to strike a fair balance between specificity and vagueness as to allow the courts for some wiggle room for interpretation
As an example, with interoperability, the final legislation might stipulate something similar to this:
* once a software service reaches sufficient market size
* the core functionality of the service must be exposed for interoperability
* any breaking changes to core functionality must allow for sufficient period of backwards-compatibility and deprecation warnings. Exceptions for security breaches or other emergencies
So, for Youtube, this would mean logging in, viewing videos and history. It doesn't mean that every single feature of every single web site must be publicly exposed and be backwards-compatible for eternity
EU privacy law is so vague that people routinely 'discover' new impacts of the rules only when some judge pulls them out of thin air. The fate of EU tech firms is pretty much well described above: endless agonizing over how these rules might be interpreted, followed by maximally damaging interpretations, because the nature of such law making is that enforcement is arbitrary.
> Your wild edge case is someone else's life and living.
Yes, the person whose name is mangled by a shitty bank's IT systems. Or the people who can see what a shitty data vacuuming company has on them( that now has to ask for consent beforehand).
Regulations are there to protect people like that, not just for fun.
The article you've linked is obviously biased ( why does it make a point of talking about totalitarian communist regimes and their death toll and not any other totalitarian regimes'? Some of the most infamous and deadly totalitarian regimes aren't communist - Iran's Islamic one, Saddam in Iraq, Hitler, Mussolini). And the argument that totalitarian regimes are bad because they wage war and that democracies can't even execute serial killers falls apart when the US is brought in. I won't even bother with the rest.
It is a similar death spiral to how we deal with the housing problem. People have a hard time finding affordable apartments in the city centers? Create more laws that limit rents! Does this create more apartments? No. It just send the local housing market further down the drain.
If there is any remaining problem it is that the rules are not enforced strictly enough on tech giants.
An indie dev in New York does not care about the GDPR. The just build cool shit and put it online. Look at all the Show HNs here.
In the EU, the situation is very different. Indie devs are super afraid and work hard to make their stuff less useful to please the GDPR.
Now about larger players:
EU companies agonize their worldwide users with cookie banners. Because that is what the GDPR tells them to do.
Non EU companies dont do that. Because why should they? Will a lone Italian traveller in the USA sue them for using Google fonts? Probably not. And if they do - they can handle it. So they only agonize their EU users with cookie banners.
That is it - as a startup, GDPR is not a massive prohlem. You know what is a real problem? The fact that you can raise 10x more investment in the US with the same slide deck.
If your business model depends on creating undesirable externalities for your "users" then you don't have my sympathy. The only shame is that we still need to enforce GDPR properly on large players, but that's a political and social thing, not per se a problem with the law itself.
And the oh so horrible cookie banners: the solution would be to not track people. If you aren't fully acting in the users interest, the cookie banner is easy to implement, or maybe not even required. So whenever you are annoyed by a cookie banner, it should be directed at the company, not the law.
If your app is literally about self quantification and the user pays you to collect that data and keep it private? You might not even need to state it anywhere, although the safe thing is of course to list all the ways you do or do not collect data.
If your app is about self quantification and you monetize by selling user data or its aggregates... GDPR. If you use a third party data provider instead of hosting the data yourself: GDPR etc. Because user data might not be important to you, but it is to your users, so you probably shouldn't be allowed to YOLO handling it
Exactly. If a company doesn't care enough about its users to even tell them what they are doing with their data (or in some cases even know what they are doing with it) then the user can't expect that company to secure it or to provide a valuable service with it.
It's funny you think deregulating housing would solve the housing crisis. If you think rent limits are a disincentive to build more affordable housing, how about we just subsidize loans for non-commercial home ownership instead of expecting investors who want a ROI to either make their luxury apartments more affordable for no good reason or adhere to health and safety standards in their barely profitable social housing projects? After all, if tenants can cough up the money to regularly pay ever-increasing rents they can surely pay back loans with similar rates.
People like you love to complain about cookie banners but somehow fail to acknowledge that the reason cookie banners are a thing is that companies go out of their way to try and game the regulations instead of actually implementing them. Sure, you can't build the next Facebook in the EU but maybe not being able to build a business on intentionally abusing your users' trust is not a bad thing.
If you just want to get rich, there's still plenty of nigh-unregulated banking and speculative investment you can get involved in with narry a consequence. If you want to build software, I'm not very sorry you're inconvenienced by regulations that actually protect people from your overreach.
But you dont like that your users data is protected by GDPR, so that you cant take it without permission? Thats unnessesary regulation holding back business?
Does not sound like it has anything to do with regulation, it sounds like you want the fovernment to give you an advantage.
Intellectual property protection is opt-in. It requires the individual to enforce his rights before a court in the relevant jurisdiction. The government only facilitates registration and adjudication. Courts don't force individuals into global protection schemes against claimant's own will.
Whatever the expected merits were, GDPR's existence as a policy has been of little more use than a protectionist beating stick in service of the EU. It gave the EU the power to dictate how websites are to be designed. Non-Europeans with business interests inside the EU had no say or representation in the matter. Governments shouldn't claim universal jurisdiction over the Internet, whatever their reasoning for such claims might be.
Yes in that people already have that agency to sue. I'm sure you've heard of a class action lawsuits.
No in that I don't approve of the GDPR prescribing what constitutes a privacy violation rather than leaving such deliberations to contracts and courts.
The GDPR, on the other hand, presupposes a global positive right to privacy irrespective of national sovereignty or contractual agreement to the contrary and that any alleged violation from any point on the planet carries with it a presumption of guilt. A regular complaint on this forum is that the US regularly oversteps it's bounds via legislation like the CLOUD ACT. I don't see why it's any less of a concern when the EU does it.
US works with a "better ask forgiveness than permission" model, where you are pretty free to do what you want, but people can sue you.
EU works with the opposite: create rules and keep companies compliant with those rules.
It's pretty obvious to see that the 1st model is very beneficial for startups and bootstrappers.
The general pro-vs-anti regulation dimension of the argument over tech policy seems to lack the necessary nuance if it doesn't ask about antitrust. The lack of antitrust regulation in the US has meant that the SV pipeline which fifteen years ago supported a diverse tech landscape is at risk of degenerating into one that only aims to produce targets for monopolists to buyout. It's a possible future of your "1st model" I'd rather we were more worried about.
For example, EU article 13 has a direct impact on my product (my users can upload custom resources). Good thing that Belgium didn't implement it yet. But when they do, I probably need to move my business to Delaware or something.
They claim that article 13 is to reign in the big companies like YouTube. But in the end this also makes sure that EU has a hard time of building their own YouTube.
Anyway, I looked into it, and it seems possible for me to move my business abroad when we get that far.
But all this basically proves my point. It's easier to build a startup when you are outside of the EU.
For a context, I'm EU national that moved to US to build a business here. US does appear freer on its surface, but everything is much more convoluted. As an example, most states have at will employment rules. That means workers can leave any time they want and employers can fire them anytime they want. But then there are many other regulations and case laws that make this essentially impossible. There is a whole predatory industry that is built around this where fired workers sue for $80k because they know that a counsel for the employer will charge $100k and it's cheaper to settle.
I would much rather have clear rules of operations, even more strenuous ones than this.
Also, cookie banners are mostly bad faith restriction implementation. You can have functional cookies with no banner. What you cant have are those tracking cookies which is what the whole thing is about.
I personally believe GDPR will never be properly enforced and most people will ignore it. The easy parts of GDPR (cookies, fonts, I guess CDNs now) are automatically detectable, and the hard parts (deletion of data, data processing agreements, necessary collection) are not. There is no way to automatically find out if someone is storing IP addresses in their access logs.
One of the really funny things I encountered in Germany is the emphasis on data privacy/protection...
But every single citizen has to inform the government where they live and their religion. You also have to inform your boss of your religion. If you make creative content, you have to publish your address as well (unless you can afford to start a business at another location).
You can find out where anyone in Germany lives for a small fee.
Those things have about 10x greater impact on my day-to-day life than Twitter finding out I watched a "cancer prognosis" video. I know they're not mutually exclusive, but it shows where priorities lie.
That depends on the religion. For a bit more context (read the full history in [1]): As part of the 1800s separation between state and church, the major ones (Catholic and Evangelic-Lutheran) got the right to a percentage of employed people's wages as a sort of "membership fee". This gets deducted by the employer out of your paycheck and collected by the tax office, then distributed to the church you're a member of. Over the years, the right to collect these taxes expanded by quite a number, although currently only the Roman Catholic, Old Catholic, Evangelic-Lutheran, Free Protestant and Jewish synagogues use that right.
In real life, no one but HR at onboarding cares which religion you specify.
Also note, this is not exclusive to Germany. Italy, Sweden, Austria, Finland, Denmark and Switzerland all have a similar system.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirchensteuer_(Deutschland)
I also think you're massively underestimating how much people care, especially in an increasingly secular Europe, even in very liberal cities like Berlin. And in small companies, there is no HR.
Second, cookie banners are unrelated to GDPR. They became mandatory years before the GDPR, and the level of intrusiveness is because websites don't follow the "spirit of the law". With time hopefully the cookie banners dark patterns will subdue (after a few more entities get fined).
In terms of EU startups, what I'm familiar with, is them getting bought by US corporations, and not failing under the pressure of EU pro-consumer bureaucracy.
A perfect counter-example to people rambling about EU legislation - Wikipedia.
Consistently in the top 10 sites in the world for 15 years, yet there's no cookie banner, no GDPR consent screen, no personal data hoarding, no dark patterns, etc.
"Following the spirit of the law" is authoritarian non-sense. I can do whatever I want unless its illegal. If the law cannot or does not spell something out how is that the public's problem? We spend enough blood sweat and tears employing legislators and bureacrats. I am not going to also do their job for them.
> To determine whether a natural person is identifiable account should be taken of all the means reasonably likely to be used, such as singling out, either by the controller or by another person to identify the natural person directly or indirectly.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.06009.pdf
Turns out writing vague laws lets you turn entities you don't like into cash cows.
You're right, that personal identifiable information is a hot topic. Partly because you need immense foresight (a.k.a. impossible) to see how multiple data points can be correlated to identify someone, but also because you need to be aware of large-scale actors (e.g. state supported dragnet surveillance).
As an industry I don't think we have reached yet that discussion point, when we still have common basic practices we need to change. For example, I know that most small/medium companies don't even attempt to anonymize their database dumps. Those are the issues we have to focus on first, and those actions become clear to any developer that reads the GDPR for the first time. It's actionable insight without being explicitly stated.
I think that the GDPR is *incompatible with the web 2.0 model, and the internet as it exists today*, and I also think that is a good thing! It should push us to build services that in the end treat all users data as personal information, and lead to anonymous internet services by default.
I have my own laundry list of things I dislike about GDPR, which makes compliance harder than it should be. One such example is that IP addresses are "an exercise left to data controllers to anonymize", where I hold the belief that the legislature should have forced ISPs to be the ones to anonymize user IP addresses (anonymize things at the source). That way data protection agreements would not be even necessary when you use a CDN in front of your website (for example). By the same token, browsers should be forced to use generic User Agents, as those leak platform information like crazy.
I also disagree that "vague laws lets you turn entities you don't like into cash cows", because what I see most common is that companies get a slap on the wrist (so to speak) and fines are not always the first recourse, only affecting those that are majorly negligent and repeat offenders.
These laws are not draconian tools to suppress digital products, but to protect users from life affecting data leaks, automated decision making and profiling, which we've seen to be objectively bad in the past.
But as you can tell this is my highly subjective take on the issue. I might be completely wrong in my belief after all.
Au contraire. This regulation will force the big tech companies to open up their platforms, thus enabling innovation and competition.
The EU does actually have a variety of "internet" companies – and that includes Germany! There are certainly less of them; regulation could be one of the things that affects that, but it seems way more likely to be a wildly different environment for funding. Investors are more conservative and far less likely to throw dumb money at anything that moves, which means fewer successful unicorns. I'm not sure that's the best approach, but I'm not an investor.
they spend endless amounts of energy on agonizing over the GDPR
No they don't. GDPR compliance is generally fairly straightforward for any company which isn't trying to deliberately harvest and profit from your data—particularly a new company with no legacy—and in any case represents a set of practices that should be followed by any company dealing with private data in any case.
By the same token, those startups have to worry far less about the nonsense patent and IP environment in the US. So worst case we'll call it a wash.
We sanctioned ourselfes by making the use of foreign SAAS illegal.
This did not happen. Use of non-EU SaaS is legal, subject to it being compliant with local regulation.
I'm always a bit weirded out by strenuous objections to GDPR – it seems to me that the data privacy environment in Europe is broadly pretty sensible. You need to:
- know what data you are using
- have a good justification for using it
- take appropriate precautions to secure it
- make sure users are aware of what you are doing with it
- allow users to access and correct the data you hold on them
I find it hard to object to that.
Many of the most powerful web tools are not compatible with the GDPR. Google Analytics. Ad marketplaces. Free CDNs. And its all a moving target. I see small companies struggling for years now with these problems. And they will keep struggling for the forseeable future.
Have you taken them fully into account when you declare that these regulations are what you want? Or do you want the first order effects only (who wouldn’t?!) and just stop your analysis there?
Declaring that there are “perfectly good alternatives” sounds like dismissal of the second order effects, which certainly makes supporting the regulations much easier to sit with.
What you're saying basically boils down to "if we stop worrying about user data then we can make more money!" which… yeah, I guess. In the same way that companies could make more money if we let them pump effluent directly into rivers – but we don't do that.
I also have experience from two start-up scale-ups that many clients are saying we won't work with you if you use a US Big Cloud. The EU alternatives are much worse and this causes lots of developer waste now ensuring the platform runs as well on the Big Cloud as it does with really terrible EU-cloud.
I also have experience from two start-up scale-ups that many clients are saying we won't work with you if you use a US Big Cloud
Yeah, I've not heard this from anyone – but if it's the case, it sounds like there's market pressure to use services that offer better protection of personal data. Sounds like you've found an opportunity to offer an EU-based cloud service that's better than the competition :)
This is going to sound more aggressive than it is but it doesn't look like you're qualified to be declaring these kinds of facts on the realities faced by EU businesses.
I'm still working at one of the two companies I mentioned, in Denmark. It's a very real problem for us right now. And I think you're understating the effort required to launch a competitive cloud, especially given the regulatory hurdles of the EU.
I would suggest you focus on talking about the specific issues you face rather than questioning my background, but bear in mind that the UK was part of the GDPR pre-Brexit, is presently subject to much the same regime, our company is a recipient of Horizon 2020 funding, we have offices, customers and investors in the EU, and I have spent several years now dealing with the regulatory issues raised by GDPR and how they impact on our business. I am reasonably confident that I know what I'm talking about – you experience may vary, and I am way more interested in hearing what you feel your challenges are than I am in nitpicking your credentials.
I'm in Qc, Canada and I see them very often. Is it only checking for a US IP, and everything else gets the banner?
Bollocks. The key difference between here and the US is the simple fact that we don't have enormous amounts of "dumb money" from pension and hedge funds screaming to be invested into anything that remotely smells like it could be worth money one time - remember Yo! which got 1M funding?! - and then founders making big money at IPO time, which many of them then choose to invest into new startups.
That means that you have to either rely on philantropic investors, family or borrow money from banks at ridiculous interest rates (and often requiring deposit of a car/house or other expensive assets to back the loan).
Navigating GDPR and the laws here is easy - one might say, life is even easier here than in the US for startups because you don't have to fear getting kicked in the nuts over bogus patent and other IP claims or absurd multi-million dollars civil damages lawsuits.
Look at where we are communicating here. On a US website built by a single person.
It's not, but it's the basis of ad-driven, surveillance-ware, and user engagement optimized companies that drive the ludicrously high profits and wages in the US tech sector.
Do you see US tech workers lining up to work for Canonical? Yeah, I thought so too.
Hiring in tech is broken regardless, so most candidates optimize for compensation as that way at least the end result justifies the effort of going through those several stages of various hazing rituals each company has lined up.
And like the Canonical employee said in that thread, they receive 80% quality applications despite all of those shitty hoops Canonical makes you jump through even before they talk to you. So yeah, there seems to be no shortage of devs regardless of how bad a company's hiring practices are, as long as they're an established name and/or pay great.
That's not the case for the EU. Money gets reasonable returns in energy sector, industry, any investment in Eastern Europe, tourism, PPP infrastructure projects, etc.
You are literally describing the opposite of the truth.
Nothing, not even the Londongrad bubble, is as excessive as the US housing crisis.
In any case at least YC does invest into European companies [1] - the key thing is you have to get far enough to have a meaningful product that VC funds can invest in, and unlike the US we don't have a lot of billionaire former founders who go around throwing a couple thousand dollars left and right for promising ideas they hear in an elevator.
Not "miss out" per se, rather a "prioritize companies in close proximity". There's a reason why a lot of the former startup turned unicorns are all concentrated around the Silicon Valley.
This only cements the power of US big tech like Google and Facebook.
And it sets the stage for the next big applications of the web all being build outside the EU as well.
Here in Germany, everyone is afraid to start a web startup. And if they do, they spend endless amounts of energy on agonizing over the GDPR and how to build useful international services without using international tools. We sanctioned ourselves by making the use of foreign SAAS illegal.
If you are in the EU, try out surfing the web via a non EU IP once. It is an eye-opening experience. No cookie banners! Only Europeans have to deal with those.
But it gets worse: Look at European websites from a US IP. You do get cookie banners. European companies deal with degraded user experience, slower build time and worse monetization. On a worldwide basis. While the rest of the world only applies these downsides to the European part of their business.