You Know GDPR Is Good Based on Who Hates It

seydor

Cookie banners are already obsolete in the age of AI. Who is wasting time defending it? People don't even care to hate GDPR these days, it's an anacrhonistic regulation from a different era that some EUrocrats like to boast about

DarmokTanagra

I hate the banners, and I am a major privacy advocate. The web has gotten so much uglier as a result of GDPR.

larodi

GDPR has one single goal - to allow aggregated presumably anonymous data markets. Period. Everything else surrounding it is diversion in a plain sight.

ChrisSD

Note that GDPR did not mandate the cookie banners we see everywhere today. Those are a form of malicious compliance. Their goal is not to conform to regulation but to undermine the regulation itself in the eyes of the public.

throw8484949ii

US companies like Meta or Google __LOVE__ GDPR. It is quagmire of complicated rules, and small startups will get burried under this quick sand. Large corporations can maintain departments of lawyers, and navigate this legal minefield. Small fines are cost of doing business, bribe that goverment would not force monopolies to spkit! Try to do marketing ad campaign as small eshop owner in EU!

jampekka

GDPR itself is quite a good law. It's implementation and enforcement are not. E.g. the nag problem would have been solved simply and effectively with something like do-not-track header (probably as OS setting, as apps are often even worse than websites with tracking). Also enforcement of obvious violations taking years and years, especially against large corporations, means it's just violated all the time. EU also failed to give good interpretation guidelines early on, causing massive piles of overjealous lawyer CYA red tape and just silly stuff like removing names from apartment buzzers.

scott_w

As someone who, until recently, worked in a company heavily impacted by GDPR, it’s a good thing. It forced the mindset away from “just do whatever is easiest,” to considering how it affects where our customer’s data is stored. Was it a PITA? Sometimes, yes. Was it stressful having a conversation with Legal to determine whether we had a PII leak under the GDPR terms that would mean we had to reach out to customers? Definitely. But you know what? That’s the cost of doing business. The outcome for EU citizens was that their data is in a better place than it otherwise would have been. And that’s a good thing.

Razengan

Same as with Apple's In App Purchases and low-friction refund process, that scummy companies like Match.com (the parent of Tinder etc) loudly opposed.

roenxi

Given the relatively recent European experience (Nazis and Communists, among others) there is a reasonable argument for data privacy even if it hampers economic growth. However... > If the rules are so terrible, why did nobody choose market exit? Because major players don't particularly mind such rules; the public doesn't care about their data all that much and everything will tick on as usual with some nag banners and compliance officers. The problem is the major players aren't going to be European because it is no longer legal for EU companies to get started by doing what the US companies did to get started. There is a reason the EU is backseat driving US software companies - EU industrial policy killed off the EU ones in the crib (to be fair that wasn't the GDPR, the GDPR is just part of the same anti-growth regulatory pattern). They died so young we've never really even learned what their names would have been. EDIT I'll point at companies like Uber. It looked pretty illegal for most of its early years, until it could afford enough lobbyists to legalise its business model. Never would have worked in the EU.

blfr

Banner gets a lot of attention because of the never-ending annoyance it's causing. It's like being surprised that someone would care about something so small as a little rock in their shoe. Yeah, you care about these little things. It is also definitely true that the regulations are largely written by people who do not understand the tech they're regulating and its potential. Again, not some weird controversial point. With every next leak where my full name, PESEL (that's like SSN here in Poland), email, phone number become semi-public and... nothing happens, I am becoming more convinced that we are annoying ourselves for nothing. Just degrading our digital lives and generating tons of legal digital text no one reads for no benefit of anyone involved. At the same time, the very people who pretend to defend my privacy, oppose Tor, Signal, anonymity online, and other tools that definitely benefit me.

sourcecodeplz

there is a whole campaign online about hating on the EU & its regulations.

sajithdilshan

I worked in a small startup in Berlin and I remember we used to have a person dedicated to handle GDPR stuff. She had to go to Berlin data authority periodically and report status. I was really surprised given how small the company was, why we needed a dedicated person to handle all the bureaucracy. Apparently it was the law. Also with the new package law in EU. I believe all these laws are how EU creates employment for their citizens. With almost every law they introduce, another new position is created in private as well as government offices and in a slowly aging continent that’s a good way to keep people employed when there isn’t much of a prospect

bryanrasmussen

I feel that this must be logical error related to ad hominem and fallacy of composition, instead of this is bad because bad people like it, this is good because bad people dislike it. That said I am generally happy with GDPR.

marcle

Tobacco control advocates sometimes referred to a "scream test": the more vigorously the industry opposed a measure, the more likely that the measure was effective.

stephantul

Cookie banners are made annoying on purpose. This has nothing to do with GDPR itself. The entities forced to show them would rather not, and thus make it as annoying as possible for you. They then use this to weaken support for the GDPR. Shame on the people making stuff like this.

varispeed

GDPR is good for corporations because it legitimises data trade. Population trained to agree to cookies now also agree to data processing just to get the banner go away and corporations have legal basis to process and sell the data. It is all working as intended. The tell tale is bodies like ICO being powerless when it comes to enforcing it. You've been screwed by big corporation? ICO will shrug.

amriksohata

If someone hates something doesnt mean that the other thing is good, thats a bizarre assumption. Im all for GDPR but has it helped stopped our data truly getting out? No just look at social media companies using subversive tactics.

blainm

The reasoning treats a correlated characteristic as a causal mechanism. successful person → unusual trait And infer: unusual trait → success The most popular example of this in tech (that never seems to die) is when people notice moments where Steve Jobs was an asshole, or he said no directly to customers, and infer they need to be more like this because it's the unusual trait they're missing and need to emulate. FDR's hatred was a byproduct of his consequential actions. But consequential actions are not the only things that produce hatred. In fact, rather petty actions can cause someone to feel hatred. If you use hatred as a proxy for importance, you are effectively saying: "All impactful people are hated, therefore all hated people are impactful." This is logically equivalent to saying "All dogs are animals, therefore all animals are dogs." The metric has zero predictive power because the set of "hated people" is vastly larger than the set of "impactful people." Friction is also terrible metric for progress. I would argue privacy has actually gotten worse due to the banners because if you decide you're not going to sign in to do something like a Google search (so it's not tied to your account), then you're immediately punished with a nag box. So you actually decide you'd rather stay signed in so you don't get nagged. Even if you're in favour of using the government, you should be using friction as a counter-signal. For example, switching to the Euro, reduced friction. Standardising to USB-C, you could argue this reduces friction for consumers.

bsian

"You know x is good based on who hates it" is too generic an argument to be useful. It applies to so many things.

apexalpha

Watching the US go from laughing at "silly EU bureaucrats making regulations" to "oh shit there's a national, privately owned AI surveillance network already" in two years is interesting.