cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/52834195
“If adopted, these amendments would not simplify compliance but hollow out the GDPR’s and ePrivacy’s core guarantees: purpose limitation, accountability, and independent oversight,” Itxaso Dominguez de Olazabal, from the European Digital Rights group, told EUobserver.
The draft includes adjustments to what is considered “personal data,” a key component of the GDPR and protected by Article 8 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.
I want to know who is behind these changes being proposed. This smells of corruption.
Compliance does need to be considered. The company I work for is trying extremely hard to comply, but because of complexities and ambiguities in the law, it is difficult to find out how to comply. I don’t know all the details, but I know legal, compliance, and the data engineering teams spend a lot of time figuring out how to be compliant and there aren’t always clear answers.
That said, the solution is not to roll back protections but to be very explicit about how to comply.
Looks like somebody has been promised by one or more large Tech firms a very highly paid non-executive board membership, millionaire speech circuit engagement or gold plated “consulting” gig when their time in the Commission is over…
Mind you, by now that kind of exchange of “favours” is tradition for the members of the EU Commission.
Humanity really can’t progress anywhere with capitalism running so rampant. Every corpo needs to go, or it will be like trying to sail against the wind.
You’re right. We are past capitalism at this point imo, though. They don’t need employees at all to extract “value” from the rest of us. They are like digital kings. We pay them to be on their lands. You should see the amount of money they extract from some of us just to be allowed to play. I pay them more than all of my bills combined to be allowed eyes in their digital fiefdom.
Do it or starve. That is the reality for a lot of us. Maybe not you, yet. (If you’re lucky enough to have a job that doesn’t need the internet)
Humanity is progressing all the time one way or another. Also corporation is a word with far wider meaning than often used, a university is a corporation, a security service is a corporation, a military is a corporation with plenty of subcorporations with their own esprit de corps, and even a network of friends playing DND is a corporation, not even talking about religious sects.
And all these corporations function, in regards to cronyism and and quid-pro-quo and silent erosion of mechanisms aimed at transparency and resilience, in absolutely the same way.
So - even in this interpretation there were people agreeing with you, which are now called “not proper communism”, who have ruined all the corporations they could find, have built their own one corporation aimed at first taking power and then fixing the world, it has diverged in a few directions, fostering under their umbrella a few other corporations along the way, and in the end result the territories which those people controlled are still pretty corporate. Except with very peculiar backbones of their organized crime, with traits of a religious sect, which can be traced back to those revolutionaries. There are even a few secret services which have been abolished or merged into other secret services, but in fact still function and their members elect their leaders. It’s scary, ironic, even beautiful, and honestly I respect those people who can keep a tradition even if membership in their structure has nothing to do with money and power anymore.
But you should notice how when trying to build a social mechanism to impose your will upon the world, like, for example, to kill all corporations, you are building a corporation.
I’ve used more words than needed to say this.
Well shit, do we EU citizens have any say in this ?
I guess Daddy Trump gets his wish afterall. Spineless cowards …
Political views are reactionary: if they’re against you, then naturally and by no real choice of your own, you’re against them.
So if anyone goes against you for your political views, they’ve made that decision long before you even knew they were against you.
The commission pitched the Digital Omnibus as simplifying and streamlining digital regulations to relieve the regulatory burden for digital services and AI systems, with a specific focus on helping small-to medium-sized businesses in Europe; however, the draft proposal goes further than expected.
won’t somebody think of the poor “AI” companies? 😢
Helping small to medium-sized businesses in Europe
Yyeeaa as if these small companies are the ones that yelled in favor of this. The lady at my local grocery shop always told me how it would be easier for her to do her job if this change in GDPR made it through…
well yeah in my personal environment, the people i talk to IRL, lots of people complain about the supposedly overly-strict GDPR rules and about the fact that it makes management quite a bit more challenging, because they have to be careful about what information to put/share where. Like, even if you make a public google sheets document as a calendar for a small company/school where a group of people can enter their email addresses, that’s already a GDPR violation, because personal data becomes accessible by other people. As a result, you theoretically would need very elaborate custom-forms, where only you can enter information but nobody else can see it. It’s a hell of a lot of work, IMHO. So yeah, people have semi-meaningfully complained about it.
What. Google forms exist. It’s really not that difficult. And also, you can just have them agree to share their emails with each other??
Yeah, that’s not it.
There’s this thing known as consent and purpose. For a GDPR violation, you need to lack either.
When your job has a noticeboard of names, emails and birthdays, they probably got your consent to post it up there. They didn’t get consent to post it onto Facebook.
Yeah, sharing a photo can be a GDPR violation. Because you need to prevent unneccessary processing of data. Like what Facebook does. That’s why most places require you to sign a waiver to allow photos and similar stuff being posted online.
It can be a lot of work. But so is writing a contract. You can’t just do some stuff willy-nilly, and for a good reason.
That being said, the GDPR is mostly unenforced. What it means in practice is “don’t ask, don’t tell”. Meaning, if you keep the info you do have under wraps, you should be fine. Just don’t go whoring your customers’/employees’ info out to your 18 356 “data partners”. Bonus points for having an “Accept All” and “More Options” button, but no “Reject All”.
1st prize for those whose “Reject All” doesn’t encompass “legitimate interest”.
Fascists in council. Only one way to deal with those…
Care to explain or do you simply call anyone you disagree with for fascists? Words matter, so stop pushing this “baaaah everyone in government are fascists”. It is incorrect and honestly tiring to hear (speaking to a relatively large group of lemmies who always throw the Nazi or fascist card when that disagree on politics).
If you have been around enough, you will start to notice patterns. Like, when a politician starts compromising their supposed ideals (lefties voting right), there’s a good chance they have been bought out. This is what the USA has been doing for years, before they went full fascist. And Europe has been having a right-wing shift over time. EU is supposed to protect human rights. When you take into account that the EU rarely does anything to actually enforce their supposed values (The Gaza Genocide is condemned, but little is actually done about it), you start to realize that it is all theatre, and that they are working against our interests.
They are clearly going down the authoritarian path, stripping us of our privacy, and autonomy more and more, so they can do as they please with us when the time comes. It’s obvious that they have certain groups of people they can’t stand, and want gone.
So, you are going to ask what all this has to do with it, play dumb, and sea lion, so I’m just going to block you now.
I was interested in your perspective. You are free to have your own opinions. You blocking me doesn’t really help your case. Runs well with you calling people you disagree with for fascists. Disagree with me and you stop the conversation because I disagree. Great mindset to have a democratic debate - something I would think that you would be interested in, qua your views. Guess not.
oh yeah i’ve heard about it.
basically, people got pissed with cookie banners so much that they complained to the EU government about it.
the EU government said “well, if people don’t like the choice to allow or deny cookies, i guess we’ll un-do these regulations”.
I think this is a very good example how people are always complaining, no matter what the government does.
If the government makes a law, a group of people complain. If the government later removes that same law that people kept whining about, another group of people complains. What to do?
Btw, another nice example is worldwide free trade. When it was introduced starting in the 1970s, people were very loud about the fact that they didn’t like it because they feared competition from foreign markets, companies moving abroad (offshoring), and jobs at home being lost. That is largely exactly what happened (though free trade also had many positive sides like exchange of technology and culture). 50 years later, world governments (especially in the west) want to un-do free trade, and people complain again about it, citing a loss of free exchange of ideas as a reason. What to do.
It’s different groups of people with different interests.
Also doesn’t help that the cookie banners were a kind of malicious compliance. They were made deliberately difficult to navigate around when you didn’t immediate hit “accept everything unequivocally”.
That the response to this malicious compliance is a retreat rather than a doubling down suggests the EU regulators are compromised by the industry and this isn’t a popular reform in any meaningful sense.
Yeah; the response should be that a “reject all” button must be displayed next to the accept all button with equal prominence, and define prominence to mean the same size, with similar contrast to the accept all button and clearly labelled.
Yeah; the response should be that a “reject all” button must be displayed next to the accept all button with equal prominence
I’ll do you one better. “Websites should default to the minimal cookies option, with settings confined to a website option menu that does not occlude the entrance page.”
I think a better way might be that browsers can auto-decline all cookies.
what this is not a always complain situation. These banners are designed to annoy you. A competent non corrupt goverments respond would be to make rules so the design would not suck, and not remove them. But these ghouls dont work for the people anymore.
Doesn’t seem terribly surprising to me, the existing rules make it very hard to make use of data for AI training in the EU. Other parts of the world have looser restrictions and they’re developing AI like gangbusters as a result. The EU needed to either loosen up too or accept this entire sector of information tech being foreign-controlled, which would have its own major privacy and security problems.
You’re not going to beat the Americans at their own game. It’s a society that does not respect the rule of law, does not believe in true market competition and does not believe in democracy.
If you think I am acting out, consider the following point: recently Meta was found to have directly (in a premeditated manner) promoted scams/frauds that netted them $16B in commission in a single year. We all know that nothing will be done about this even under a hypothetical centre-right US government.
How do we know that? Well was anything done about Microsoft’s anti-competitive behaviour in the 90s?
But for me, the real irony is the polemics about competition and “free market”. In a real free market, MS, Meta, Google would not have hundreds of billions of dollar to burn because competition would drive profit margins to a state of approaching zero. Zuck would not be able to burn $45 B on his weird and disgusting Metaverse Mii autosexuality fetish.
Not a fan of the leadership of China, but I genuinely do believe that one area that we can learn from them is how to deal with oligarchs.
How do we deal with oligarchs including Xi?
Xi is not an oligarch, to my knowledge, he has always worked in the CCP.
I thought he was a rich ruler interested in extending his lifespan
Sure, but he is not an oligarch.
How so? I thought the definition is member of a group of wealthy individuals wielding sovereign power. Which he seems to meet fine, unless he’s the only wealthy individual in the ccp
member of a group of wealthy individuals wielding sovereign power
This doesn’t seem right. Russian oligarchs do not wield sovereign power, yet they are still oligarchs.
They wield power, but the term sovereign doesn’t seem appropriate.
As if the GDPR was a barrier to IP theft
Did you read the article? It says that making AI training easier is a key purpose of these changes.
Why should any of us approve of making things easier for technofascists?
Did I say you should approve of it? I’m just explaining why it comes as no surprise to me.
And my point was they’re already doing this in the face of regulation.
Sounds like the problem is lack of enforcement of the existing laws rather than the existing laws being bad.
To provide an extreme example, just because there’s a wave of murders doesn’t mean murder should be made legal.
Then why change the rules? The article’s author seems quite convinced that this will make AI training easier.
Because they want to strip the right to privacy so they can better monetize
Naive to think the GDPR is stopping anyone now.
Naive to think the GDPR is stopping anyone now.
So again, why change the rules? If the GDPR is already ineffective there’s no need to loosen it more.
Are you asking me why some in Europe want to make it legal? Because they’re already doing it, just they want to make it legal
Make sense?
The guy explained the rational he didn’t say it was his personal view that it should be done.
And even if was his view we shouldn’t be down voting things based on whether you agree or not. We should do it on whether it adds to the discussion.
The quality of discourse on lemmy is fucking dire.
Explaining something no one asked to be explained without providing an opinion on the subject itself reads like tacit approval. On a subject such as this - "reduce your privacy for the benefit of AI companies that are some number of:
- monopolies that should have been busted many times over
- run by evil, greedy people who do not consider safety for the entire world when developing these things (reference Musk saying there’s a chance these destroy the world but that he’d rather be alive to see it happen than not contribute to the destruction)
- companies aiming not to better the world in anyway but explicitly pursue money at any real cost to the human lives they’re actively stealing from or attempting to invalidate." - it’s no surprise the comment is unpopular and gets downvoted.
If I stopped my comment there I’d get voted on based on my explanation of what just happened assuming I was pro-this process because that’s human nature (or maybe it’s a byproduct of modern media discourse where they ask questions but don’t answer them and expect you to fill in the blanks (look at most of conservative media when it’s dog whistling or talking about data around crime or what have you)).
I don’t think someone should be voted into the ground for explaining something, but I also think every online comment should do it’s best to make a stand on the core subject they’re discussing. We are in dire times and being a bystander let’s evil people win.
So practicing what I’m preaching: Privacy laws should absolutely not be reduced for the benefit of AI companies. We should create regulations and safety rails around AI companies so they practice ethically and safely, which won’t happen in the US.
Explaining something no one asked to be explained without providing an opinion on the subject itself reads like tacit approval.
Do some people’s brains really work like that? I prefer it when people simply describe a problem, instead of making it all tribal and mixing reality with opinion!
I mean, I like when I ask someone to explain a problem and then do. I don’t personally like it when someone explains a problem that’s pretty obvious.
My point is the original commenter, by explaining something no one asked to be explained, sort of gave away their opinion with their explanation. Actually, on second read it’s far more explicit - they’re defending why the change was made, not just explaining what happened. The downvotes were warranted (if you use downvotes as “this is a bad opinion, perspective, or contribution” which is debatably not their purpose).
But the reality is even in describing a problem you’re coloring reality with your perspective. There are facts, things everyone can agree on, but in describing those things you color them. It doesn’t have to be tribal to push back on someone coloring the loss of privacy laws for the betterment of AI companies as a good or necessary thing (like the original commenter did).
explaining something no one asked to be explained, sort of gave away their opinion with their explanation
I understood that point of view. I just don’t agree, at all! I prefer factual conversation, describing the dilemma. OP demonstrated that they understand that the problem has multiple tradeoffs.
coloring the loss of privacy laws for the betterment of AI companies as a good or necessary thing (like the original commenter did).
The original commenter didn’t do that? They described the tradeoff.
I think you prefer tribal, coloured conversation. To the point where if it doesn’t match your preferred colour, you very quickly and incorrectly assume people are anti your colour?
“The EU needed to either loosen up too or accept this entire sector of information tech being foreign-controlled, which would have its own major privacy and security problems.”
This is the original commenter justifying why the EU is attempting to loosen their privacy laws. This is not factual, this is not an objective truth, this is one person’s perspective about why the EU is doing what they’re doing and in a way that defends their position.
If they had said, “Maybe the EU felt the need to… In fear of this entire sector…” That would have revealed that statement to be a less objective, more theoretical opinion - which is what it is. But they didn’t. They wrote it as a fact, defending their decision as if A) that was true B) that was the reason instead of a handful of reasons C) it was the only path forward.
I think if you’re reading that statement by the original commenter in any other way, we’re at least misaligned on what they’re saying. I would argue that statement plainly reads as defending their actions by guessing (even if reasonable or intelligently) as to their motives.
I think you’re throwing around tribal like a buzzword you recently became aware of. I like people having opinions on random comment based forums online. I don’t like when people don’t add to the conversation and yet comment anyway, allowing for wasteful conversations like this to take place. The original commenter explained a thing no one asked to be explained at best and defended a perspective that I think is objectively short sighted at worst. I have no problem with the first and I don’t like the second but also am happy to talk to people who hold those opinions if they’re looking for a safe place to discuss and debate them.
Now that’s a couple ways of interpretting what the original commenter said, both of which I think are justifiable although I lean obviously to one way. Does that read like I’m simplifying the problem reductively? Does that read like I’m asking people to throw stones at the commenter? Has anything I’ve written even read like I’m forming a group of like minded people, virtue signaling, and running the other person out of town?
I would say no, obviously not. You seem frustrated at online discourse, or maybe you’re just pro-these-actions and can’t separate them from this conversation. You wanna talk about the actions of the EU, that’s cool. You wanna talk about one random person’s perspective as to why the original commenter got downvotes, that’s cool. You want to acuse me of being simple, when I’m clearly responding to what the person wrote and only what the person wrote (both the first commenter and the person I responded to), that seems like a waste of time. It’s surely not adding anything to the conversation for me at least.
But here we are.
This is the original commenter justifying why the EU is attempting to loosen their privacy laws.
Not justifying why, explaining why. I was giving the reason why I think they’re doing this.
Lots of people hate that it’s being done, so any reasoning behind it is being interpreted as support for it. But I’m not in the EU, I have no skin in this game at all one way or the other, it doesn’t matter to me whether this change is made. I’m just pointing out why I wasn’t surprised this change was made. The GDPR is hindering AI training and AI is a really big thing right now. The AI training stuff wasn’t mentioned in the summary so my mention in the comments is presenting something that other readers might not be aware of.
The response has frankly been ridiculous. I didn’t include the obligatory “oooh, I hate AI so much!” Flags in my comment, and so this has turned into a huge waste of time as everyone piles on about that rather than about the actual changes to the GDPR the thread was supposedly about.
The quality of discourse on lemmy is fucking dire.
Amen. A large fraction of the people on lemmy lack empathy and the ability to consider other viewpoints in general. Very anti-social, close minded crowd.
I do have to give kudos to the mods here, though. Even though my comment was extremely unpopular they’ve removed the responses to it where people were outright insulting me for making it.
Yeah, the downvote button isn’t even being used as an “I disagree with this” button in this case, it’s an “I hate the general concept this comment is about” button. And now you’re getting downvoted too for pointing that out.
Guess I should have just said “boy howdy do I ever hate AI, good thing it’s a bubble and everything will go right back to the way things were when it pops” and raked in the upvotes instead.
Just when it became technically feasible to autodecline in all kinds of cookie banners with AI enabled browsers/browser plug-ins…
