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So I should be afraid of litigation?

Then wtf is the point of GDPR if nobody will be sued for violating it?

Discourse, disqus good job nit picking.

How about you try answering this question I posed to you

What is your point here? What is your point when you say that the EU is not litigious? Are you saying that I shouldn't expect to receive a fine for violating GDPR? Are you saying that I should just ignore GDPR data access requests if I am operating in a supposedly ethical manner and I am not selling user information?

>Except this forum software does provide a tool that lets the user export their own data, as well as a tool that lets an admin strip all identifying data.

Completely besides the point, there are hundreds of different pieces of forum software that may not have that feature implemented.

>The only way this targets non-European businesses is because the litigious nature of US culture seems to lead to this sort of overreaction.

Did I ever bring up litigation? What is your point here?

This is at least the 5th instance I've seen of a website announcing their closure due to GDPR on Hacker News. Most websites probably wouldn't announce it and given that a post about simply blocking all EU users got upvoted to the front page less than a week ago I doubt the idea of blocking all EU users isn't more prevalent.

https://www.polygon.com/2018/4/28/17295498/super-monday-nigh...

https://digiday.com/media/gdpr-mayhem-programmatic-ad-buying...

http://money.cnn.com/2018/05/25/media/gdpr-news-websites-la-...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/24/sites-blo...

Try doing some basic research before asking leading questions that you don't expect responses to.

> Yes, this is really little different from shutting down a whole forum because you received a single DMCA request.

Completely unrelated. Not only are DMCA requests easier to handle than data access requests, the fines for not complying with GDPR are disproportionately larger for violating DMCA.

Work required for complying with a DMCA request: delete the offending material, a basic feature implemented on every single piece of forum software

Work required for complying with a data access request: Search every single service you potentially could have stored user data in and provide it to the user. A non basic feature that requires custom development.

Additionally any malevolent user (as is shown in this case) is incentivized to send a GDPR data access request while this is not true for DMCA.

I agree however that they are both horrible laws. So if your argument was to show that GDPR is just as bad as the DMCA I agree. GDPR is a horrible law and it is not obvious to me that the law wasn't created specifically to target non European business.

> If those equivalent resources are thousands (or millions) of government panels then we should be able to mathematically prove equivalency.

There is a method of solving an NP complete problem with thousands (or millions) of government panels?

> if Lockheed martin were to start a Gmail, GDocs equivalent tomorrow, would you use their services knowing how closely they work with the military?

Them working closely with the military would not be the reason I would choose not to use their service considering that almost all emails already go through NSA servers.

>We put our faith into them, in the hopes that they would honor their creed, that they would do no evil.

Working for the US military is not doing evil.

> then it implies that there is nothing special about markets

How so? It implies simply that markets are not efficient. It does not imply that state control would be more efficient and it does not imply that markets are not the most efficient way of determining the value of a resource.

What it definitely says however, is that a government committee could not, in any way, successfully determine the value of all goods and fix prices based on that determination.

Is the law only effective at protecting privacy in your mind if it kills Facebook's and Google's business model?

Because I suspect that is what GDPR advocates truly want.

I don't believe the 2 party system is the problem. Looking at political polarization in a country like France and it's just as bad.

Thank you for giving my comment the least charitable reading possible. If that were the case why would I even bother leading with

"you will either lead the way" If a better monetization scheme that ads arises from the ashes of GDPR then I really will have no reason to be frustrated.

This is correct.

I don't care how you reword it, those "rights" are stupid.

You mean the consent like not going on the website in the first place? And if all GDPR was just a bunch of consent forms it wouldn't even be a problem.

GDPR is bad/onerous for the following reasons

- right to have access to the information that is being stored on you

- right to be forgotten

- right to view a web page without being shown ads

If GDPR was only asking for consent + banning the sale of information to 3rd parties it would hardly have had the chilling effect it is currently having.

>It should be possible to track ad campaigns and therefore see exactly the turnover ratios as long as the campaigns are broad enough that they don't target individual users. In the analog world they to this for example via coupon codes which are unique to the ad.

This will severely undercount the number of conversions. It's not atypical for someone to view/click an ad and then purchase at a later date through a different channel.

It was possible to track that before GDPR. It is not possible now.

> Which is how the paper and TV ads industry worked for more than half a century, forcing brands to push creative limits in creating campaigns that we regard sometimes as a pinnacle of arts and media culture. Just because the Internet lets you laser focus a campaign by profiling the shit out of people, it doesn’t mean that is how things should work.

How did the paper and tv industry work? Oh yeah, advertisers would crowd around and bid up the largest players. Small niche products would receive little to no revenue and die quick deaths.

That is what I suspect will happen in the EU. Without tracking Advertisers will be unable to know how their ads are performing. Without metrics such as conversions which require end to end tracking advertisers will need to rely on the reputation of the platform.

Products such as google and facebook will receive significant attention from advertisers. The tiny blog you enjoy reading that is barely scraping by will receive very little.

>Good

I've been seeing GDPR supporters saying that a lot recently. Time will show if it's true. I admit it's possible that removing ads as a revenue model could somehow allow europeans to innovate and discover a superior model but I'm not betting on it.

Thank you Europe for being the guinea pigs, you will either lead the way or hopefully prevent others from making the same mistakes.

GDPR benefits the US and US tech dominance. With GDPR the EU just legislated away one of the most profitable monetization schemes ever devised. I think the administration will sit back and do nothing and watch the fire from across the pond.

>If anything, GDPR should be seen as an opportunity to disrupt the quasi-monopolistic online ad market.

It's amazing to me how people manage to fool themselves into thinking there is hope when the world is crumbling around them.

If Google can't make ads profitable in the EU what makes you think some tiny European company will be able to disrupt the ad market?

How would they even do it without tracking? I can see the conversation with major brands now

EU Ad Startup - "Trust us, the ads you are paying for are performing great. We are very confident that they are driving conversions on your website."

Brand- "Ok, do you have any numbers to prove we are receiving conversions due to your ads?"

EU Ad Startup - "No as that would be illegal under GDPR, but please trust our business."

>The US holds one dominating advantage in one subset of technology. Consumer-facing internet tech. While a lot of people employed in this field commentate on this website, it's a marginal part of the tech industry, and it's not worth sacrificing privacy for, Europe does not need Silicon Valley to produce high-value products.

> it's a marginal part of the tech industry

Hilarious

I mean, fine. I'm not an EU citizen, I think GDPR is a pain in ass but ultimately is not my decision no matter how much I judge you all.

But it does frustrate me that you all believe that GDPR will somehow be good for you. I've seen it said multiple times that when a massive American media company decides to pull out of the EU that a European alternative will emerge that is GDPR compliant and replace it.

Do you actually believe that if the economics of GDPR compliance did not work for a large American business that it will somehow work out for a small EU startup? The only way I can see it work out is if GDPR is selectively enforced against American business which it seems obvious to me that will be the case.

>Obviously if ads are less targeted then they may be less effective so advertisers will make less on ads that cost more. This will hurt their bottom line, which in turn will make the products we buy more expensive. But that's exactly the end goal. I want to pay for things (information, products) with more money rather than with slightly less money and all my integrity.

I'm sure you considered all the poor people across the world that are subsidized by the ad driven model we use today. What we truly need on the internet is data gated behind pay walls to protect important information such as which facebook groups you clicked like on.

And how is this related?

>The requirement to hire a DPO is not a new thing, by the way - many countries in the EU already required this. This is true for many provisions in the GDPR - in Germany, for example, very little changes from the way it used to be, their data protection law was strict to begin with.

Good for those countries? I'm not going to be happy with the idea of hiring some idiot to sit around and do nothing all day.

Can you explain to me the point of this comment? I'm too dense.

If you plan on doing business with EU entities at any point in the future there could be risk