Without extremely aggressive changes to how we handle situations like this, it seems unlikely
A fine is a price, and there are basically no laws that put financial, let alone criminal liability for people behind the corporate veil or seizure/dissolution of a corporation that consistently breaks the law on the table
Whenever the GDPR is mentioned here, people more or less treat it as a sign of fascism. With that attitude from us, how can our rights on privacy be respected?
I'm extremely glad that the GDPR and NOYB.eu mean that car manufacturers can't pull that shit here. If I opt out, I'm opted out, or there will be big fines for them.
The problem with the GDPR is the overhead. If it was one line that said "you can't sell data on people without their explicit freely given consent" then anybody could comply with it by simply not selling data on people.
But it's a long piece of legislation and some of the requirements are time-consuming to implement even if you're not doing anything nefarious. "It is bad for innocent people to incur uncompensated costs" should be a primary principle in creating legislation.
> If I opt out, I'm opted out, or there will be big fines for them.
They're getting sued. If the plaintiffs win they'll have to pay. It's not obvious why this is worse or any less of a deterrent.
> It's not obvious why this is worse or any less of a deterrent.
I'd say it may not be obvious why, but it's obvious that it is less of a deterrent, because this sort of data trading seems to be commonplace and semi-overt in the US, and much less common (and hush-hush in the rare cases where it does happen) in Europe.
I'd also hazard a guess why it's less of a deterrent: the risk, i.e. probability of successfully getting sued * cost of successfully getting sued, is likely much lower compared to the relatively high probability of a DPA going "WTF no" in Europe as soon as someone reports it.
How? Who will represent that viewpoint in the halls of congress? The EFF is politically ineffective and always has been for reasons I don't understand, and no one else seems to care.
> The EFF is politically ineffective and always has been for reasons I don't understand, and no one else seems to care.
Going by the EFF's latest published financials (2022), they took in $23 million vs $16.6 million in expenses. Vs literal billionaires and nation states. Some of the billionaires have more money than the nation states do. David, meet Goliath.
I care. I give them my money. They seem to do a better job at advancing these interests than anyone else. I'm more in awe of their attempts to take on issues of this magnitude given their meager resources than anything else.
Let’s think outside the box a little. What we need is a general process whereby the public gets to decide if a business should exist. Too often companies just form, abuse us, and there is no way to stop them. What if, once a year, companies had to justify their existence in front of a citizen panel or a jury of random people or something? They’d need to demonstrate what good the public receives from their existence, or their assets get sold and the company dissolved. Why do we believe that companies simply have a natural right to exist as long as they can survive? Where did this come from? Companies should answer to the public!
> They’d need to demonstrate what good the public receives from their existence, or their assets get sold and the company dissolved.
If their assets get sold and one entity buys all of them then they could just carry on operating the same company with them. The most likely buyer for something like that would be a competitor. That seems bad.
Maybe we could require the opposite. Their assets get sold, but can't all be sold to the same party. You split the company up, e.g. by delaminating vertically integrated components into separate companies. That way it's easier to enter the market and compete with any of them because you don't have to replicate the whole stack, only that one component.
You might not even need to have a vote, just some rules for when this happens automatically, like when a company has more than e.g. 35% market share, because that's too close to a monopoly and you wouldn't want a trust to form. We could call this anti-trust.
> What we need is a general process whereby the public gets to decide if a business should exist.
So if I want to start a small business, say a mom and pop restaurant, the public has to approve it first? You must be joking. Most businesses are small businesses. Hamstringing them is a recipe for disaster. Our regulatory system already disadvantages small businesses in countless ways. Indeed, that's part of the reason why large businesses can get away with so much.
The public already has a way to disapprove a business: don't buy from it. If nobody buys what the business is selling, it goes out of business.
The real oversight the public should be exercising, but isn't, is to vote out of office politicians that allow large businesses to buy their way out of trouble.
If con-gress was serious, theyd ban/restrict any social media that relied on tracking. Or better yet, they'd pass a bill restricting data brokers of any sort ala GDPR.
I agree data brokering of any kind should be completely illegal. I don't think tiktok is only being banned because of china though. I just think it's a bonus compared to bytedance legitimately being a malicious data-harvesting nightmare that also happens to own one of the most mentally damaging social networks of the decade
This is funny, but sadly true... I just told someone yesterday if lawmakers truly cared about all of this they'd ban all social media. Lobbyists and lawmakers will be eating well until then.
Without extremely aggressive changes to how we handle situations like this, it seems unlikely
A fine is a price, and there are basically no laws that put financial, let alone criminal liability for people behind the corporate veil or seizure/dissolution of a corporation that consistently breaks the law on the table
Whenever the GDPR is mentioned here, people more or less treat it as a sign of fascism. With that attitude from us, how can our rights on privacy be respected?
I'm extremely glad that the GDPR and NOYB.eu mean that car manufacturers can't pull that shit here. If I opt out, I'm opted out, or there will be big fines for them.
The problem with the GDPR is the overhead. If it was one line that said "you can't sell data on people without their explicit freely given consent" then anybody could comply with it by simply not selling data on people.
But it's a long piece of legislation and some of the requirements are time-consuming to implement even if you're not doing anything nefarious. "It is bad for innocent people to incur uncompensated costs" should be a primary principle in creating legislation.
> If I opt out, I'm opted out, or there will be big fines for them.
They're getting sued. If the plaintiffs win they'll have to pay. It's not obvious why this is worse or any less of a deterrent.
What piece of regulating legislation have you seen that's one line?
6 replies →
> It's not obvious why this is worse or any less of a deterrent.
I'd say it may not be obvious why, but it's obvious that it is less of a deterrent, because this sort of data trading seems to be commonplace and semi-overt in the US, and much less common (and hush-hush in the rare cases where it does happen) in Europe.
I'd also hazard a guess why it's less of a deterrent: the risk, i.e. probability of successfully getting sued * cost of successfully getting sued, is likely much lower compared to the relatively high probability of a DPA going "WTF no" in Europe as soon as someone reports it.
1 reply →
How? Who will represent that viewpoint in the halls of congress? The EFF is politically ineffective and always has been for reasons I don't understand, and no one else seems to care.
> The EFF is politically ineffective and always has been for reasons I don't understand, and no one else seems to care.
Going by the EFF's latest published financials (2022), they took in $23 million vs $16.6 million in expenses. Vs literal billionaires and nation states. Some of the billionaires have more money than the nation states do. David, meet Goliath.
I care. I give them my money. They seem to do a better job at advancing these interests than anyone else. I'm more in awe of their attempts to take on issues of this magnitude given their meager resources than anything else.
I'm sorry, but what nation-state or billionaire is fighting against the EFF? In fact, the EFF is funded by billionaires and nation-states.
1 reply →
Let’s think outside the box a little. What we need is a general process whereby the public gets to decide if a business should exist. Too often companies just form, abuse us, and there is no way to stop them. What if, once a year, companies had to justify their existence in front of a citizen panel or a jury of random people or something? They’d need to demonstrate what good the public receives from their existence, or their assets get sold and the company dissolved. Why do we believe that companies simply have a natural right to exist as long as they can survive? Where did this come from? Companies should answer to the public!
> They’d need to demonstrate what good the public receives from their existence, or their assets get sold and the company dissolved.
If their assets get sold and one entity buys all of them then they could just carry on operating the same company with them. The most likely buyer for something like that would be a competitor. That seems bad.
Maybe we could require the opposite. Their assets get sold, but can't all be sold to the same party. You split the company up, e.g. by delaminating vertically integrated components into separate companies. That way it's easier to enter the market and compete with any of them because you don't have to replicate the whole stack, only that one component.
You might not even need to have a vote, just some rules for when this happens automatically, like when a company has more than e.g. 35% market share, because that's too close to a monopoly and you wouldn't want a trust to form. We could call this anti-trust.
> What we need is a general process whereby the public gets to decide if a business should exist.
So if I want to start a small business, say a mom and pop restaurant, the public has to approve it first? You must be joking. Most businesses are small businesses. Hamstringing them is a recipe for disaster. Our regulatory system already disadvantages small businesses in countless ways. Indeed, that's part of the reason why large businesses can get away with so much.
The public already has a way to disapprove a business: don't buy from it. If nobody buys what the business is selling, it goes out of business.
The real oversight the public should be exercising, but isn't, is to vote out of office politicians that allow large businesses to buy their way out of trouble.
4 replies →
What about all the employees of the company that don’t set policy, aka the vast majority of the employees?
2 replies →
Nah we're just here busy banning tiktok
China bad whirrrrrrrrr.
If con-gress was serious, theyd ban/restrict any social media that relied on tracking. Or better yet, they'd pass a bill restricting data brokers of any sort ala GDPR.
Nope. China bad. USA good!
I agree data brokering of any kind should be completely illegal. I don't think tiktok is only being banned because of china though. I just think it's a bonus compared to bytedance legitimately being a malicious data-harvesting nightmare that also happens to own one of the most mentally damaging social networks of the decade
6 replies →
This is funny, but sadly true... I just told someone yesterday if lawmakers truly cared about all of this they'd ban all social media. Lobbyists and lawmakers will be eating well until then.
Of course not. Congress and SCOTUS are all paid for.