Comment by pyuser583
10 hours ago
I’ve read the GDPR has zero impacts on national security/law enforcement. It applies weakly to other state functions.
I’ve also seen cases where GDPR is used against religious groups that have a strong religious justification for keeping lists of believers. Think Orthodox Jews and the Catholic Church, which regard family trees and baptismal certificates as semi-sacred. And kept on paper or scrolls.
Not sure what to think about that. Regulating a sacred scroll like a database table seems wrong.
The reason why we're not keeping lists of which people believe what religion, is because such lists were extremely useful to the nazis in WW2 when exterminating Jewish people.
> Think Orthodox Jews
Pretty sure they would remember why this is the case.
> Regulating a sacred scroll like a database table seems wrong.
There is actually no perceivable or material difference between something that is considered "sacred" and that which is not. It really hinges on whether some subset of some splinter of some religion considers it so.
But, I'm not familiar with these cases you mention, I think there's some details left out that should matter. The really weird thing to me, is that a sports club can keep a list of members easily (yes they need to abide by the GDPR but it's not hard), and if somehow a "religious group" can't manage that level of organization, I don't think their opinion on what objects are considered "sacred" should count for much, either.
Another issue is that "religious groups" can have a different opinion of who are their members and who they get to keep data on, and it doesn't matter whether those records are "sacred" or not, according to the GDPR it is not the "religious group", but the people whose data is being kept whose opinion counts. It would be ridiculous otherwise. I had to email a Church to stop tracking me (which happens if you're baptized as a baby), and that should be my choice, it would be insane if they could claim "yeah tough luck, but our records are sacred".