A critical reflection on GDPR
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@el_heffe said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
Maybe it's because I can type my name into any search engine and get a long list of people with the same name who are not me, including three people who live within a few blocks of me.
Not me, for better or worse... :(
Well, actually, I do live right across the street from myself at an unregistered address on one of those results, but that's just details, and a missile missing by ten feet really isn't going to make a difference...
Filed under: Stupid government shifting GPS readings for this exact scenario arbitrarily
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@mrl And trucks hauling oil are on the freeways. What if they explode! What if a train derails due to bad track maintenance! What if the transformer outside blows up and sets my house on fire! What if what if!
Yes there's all kinds of hypothetical horror scenarios.
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@topspin said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
None of this Equifax and Cambridge Analytica and whatever stuff matters?
What in the flying fuck does that have to do with third-party cookies?
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@heterodox big tech iz bad, here's other big tech that wuz bad
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@topspin said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
None of this Equifax and Cambridge Analytica and whatever stuff matters? Geez.
Cambridge? No. Equifax? I don't see what that had to do with cookies. Their whole business has always revolved around sensitive personal information.
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@topspin said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
@boomzilla said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
I've never understood the problem here. You're explaining the what but not the harm that @blakeyrat was asking about.
You guys are technical people, you really think there's no way this could ever go wrong? Even ways that people haven't even thought about it yet? None of this Equifax and Cambridge Analytica and whatever stuff matters? Geez.
Forget cookies, GDPR has nothing to do with Equifax's layers of fail. Equifax could do what it did today in the middle of Paris, and while it'd be in violation of... something it wouldn't be GDPR. Cambridge Analytica would probably be in violation of certain GDPR stuff, but that also has nothing to do with cookies. The whole "this site uses cookies" popup nonsense is simply scary looking bullshit that scares old people without actually doing anything bad.
How about this: with all that profiling, Amazon determines exactly how much you can just barely afford to pay for something, and raises the price accordingly. And so will everybody else, because they've all been tracking you.
And Amazon will continue to do that, with GDPR. You just have to opt-in to let them do it. Nothing changes.
Then maybe they'll be more sneaky and just adjust their search results to show you the items they want you to buy instead, while your neighbor sees the cheaper shit instead for the same results.
Again, what will GDPR and cookies do to prevent that?
And that's, like, probably among the bottom of the list of shitty things that could happen. You bought cigarettes so your health insurance will raise their prices. You won't get a loan because you took too many Ubers to an area with casinos.
Health insurance already charges smokers more. And if you lie on the form and get caught, you're in big trouble. Banks don't give a shit about how you spend your money. They care about your existing liabilities versus assets and gross income to determine your risk of defaulting. Whether you spend that income on casinos, strippers, or your model train hobby means fuck-all to them.
Who the fuck knows. Use your imagination.
We have an internet-of-shit thread where people thought that it'd be a good idea to put your fucking toaster on the web. Lack of utility aside, the security nightmares are the same kind of "what could possibly go wrong?" thinking.
Guess what? I agree that there's some serious legitimate concerns about IoT becoming spy instruments. I personally won't have a voice-activated smart device in my house because I find the idea of a microphone hooked up to the cloud creepy whether its creator is evil or not. But GDPR is going to do jack-shit about this concern. All it changes is instead of buying the device and hooking it up, you have to go through a bunch of privacy policies written out that will resemble pretty much any contract that has fine print about selling your first-born to slavery and allowing Hulk Hogan to enter your house and knock you senseless on a weekly basis which will be agreed to because the vast majority of the public doesn't read that stuff before agreeing to it.
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@blakeyrat said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
Haha you think that London's roughly 56 quintillion security cameras are going to ask permission?
I hate to break it to you but most of those literally thousands of cameras already belong to the government.
No. Not by a loooong shot.
Pauline Norstrom, vice chair of the BSIA’s CCTV section, said, “There is a popular misconception that the camera population in the UK is owned by the Government. The BSIA statistics set the record straight once and for all. It is private businesses who own the material camera population, not the Government. Day to day, these cameras are not available to the Government and law enforcement agencies, they are busy working to protect their owner’s premises. “It is only when a major crime occurs, that the Police ask business owners if they have captured any footage of criminals passing through the private cameras field of view. Without the help of businesses investing into their privately-owned systems, the Police would only have access to the one publically-owned camera per 1,000 head of population. Far too few to be useful and certainly not the surveillance society, which could be portrayed.
The vast majority of CCTV cameras are not operated by government bodies, but by private individuals or companies, especially to monitor the interiors of shops and businesses. According to 2011 Freedom of Information Act requests, the total number of local government operated CCTV cameras was around 52,000 over the entirety of the UK.[108]
An article published in CCTV Image magazine estimated the number of private and local government operated cameras in the United Kingdom was 1.85 million in 2011.
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@laoc 52,000 is "literally thousands".
Do businesses own more cameras? Well duh. Yah. Every supermarket has a few dozen, every 7-11 at least a half-dozen, every McDonalds has a dozen or so. Naturally.
That doesn't change anything about my point and I make no apologies for my post.
Meanwhile, the question:
What real harm has occurred due to 3rd party cookies, or what realistic and plausible harm scenario could occur due to 3rd party cookies?
Goes unanswered. Instead of answering the question, all we get is factoids about how much data Google has or that Equifax is terrible. I just want a simple answer to my simple question. The fact that nobody can provide one makes me think the fear of cookies is simply irrational paranoia.
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@blakeyrat said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
@laoc 52,000 is "literally thousands".
Across the entire UK, not London.
Do businesses own more cameras? Well duh. Yah. Every supermarket has a few dozen, every 7-11 at least a half-dozen, every McDonalds has a dozen or so. Naturally.
That doesn't change anything about my point and I make no apologies for my post.
Except that most of those literally thousands of cameras do not belong to the government.
That doesn't mean there weren't far too many government-owned cameras already. But most are exactly doing what @anonymous234 said: "sending stuff to each other (and to their corporate overlords)".
What real harm has occurred due to 3rd party cookies, or what realistic and plausible harm scenario could occur due to 3rd party cookies?
Goes unanswered.
Sorry, I didn't see you asking it. The answer is simple: beyond the invasion of privacy that many people see as harmful even though it hurts just as little as your average peeping tom, I think manipulating people's behavior at the whim of the highest bidder is very real harm.
Edit: typo
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@blakeyrat said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
I just want a simple answer to my simple question. The fact that nobody can provide one makes me think the fear of cookies is simply irrational paranoia.
I think the problem here is everyone has different definitions of the word "harm".
To some, the ability for someone to track that kind of information is inherently harmful, and while, yes, that kind of information is available via other means, they would not like it spread further. That would be the "invasion of privacy" aspect.
Others may be worried about the potential for this information to get out. That's where mentioning Equifax comes in - do you trust a random ad agency to be secure enough to not get breached? While the end results of this may not be life-shattering, some people may not like their internet history (or a significant chunk of it) displayed for all to see, especially if it contains... sensitive information.
Others, such as yourself, apparently see nothing harmful in those scenarios. You don't care as much about privacy as they do. That's fine, but some people have concerns about their privacy, and that's where this argument stems from.
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Oh hey, Google opinion rewards didn't email but instead did a thing.
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@heterodox said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
What in the flying fuck does that have to do with third-party cookies?
@boomzilla said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
Cambridge? No. Equifax? I don't see what that had to do with cookies. Their whole business has always revolved around sensitive personal information.
The question being addressed was how ubiquitous profiling matters, if you care about your privacy. Because that's what third-party cookies do, follow you everywhere and create profiles. Those were just different means of leaking personal information.
There's also that thread about "venmo social feed is dumb". I mean, what's the problem with people knowing what you spend money on if you're fine with other people completely analyzing everything you do (including what you probably spend money on)?
@the_quiet_one said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
Health insurance already charges smokers more
Certainly not here, but alas.
@the_quiet_one said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
And Amazon will continue to do that, with GDPR. You just have to opt-in to let them do it. Nothing changes.
I opt in to amazon tracking my shopping on their site, fine. I'm not opting in to using profiles created by 3rd-party ad networks on every other site. All kinds of random sites using google-or-whatever trackers certainly won't get their permission from me.
@the_quiet_one said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
Guess what? I agree that there's some serious legitimate concerns about IoT becoming spy instruments. But GDPR is going to do jack-shit about this concern.
I was talking about how it's a concern, mostly, not about how effective GDPR is. We'll see about that. If you have any suggestions about "laws don't matter because coorporations will just force you to give up on them", let's hear them. I'm pretty sure outlawing tracking would cause even more complaints.
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@blakeyrat said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
Meanwhile, the question:
What real harm has occurred due to 3rd party cookies, or what realistic and plausible harm scenario could occur due to 3rd party cookies?
Goes unanswered.
It allows to create complete behavioral profiles and invades your privacy.
Instead of answering the question, all we get is factoids about how much data Google has
How do you think google got all that data?
I just want a simple answer to my simple question. The fact that nobody can provide one makes me think the fear of cookies is simply irrational paranoia.
I've given some scenarios where tracking profiles could turn out harmful. You will probably point out how they're either:
- data created by other means, ignoring similar can be done with cookies (and I don't really care what technical means you use to invade my privacy)
- things that are hypothetical, so they don't count
- things that are already being done, so they don't count
- not bad to you, because you don't mind to have all your data out in the open
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@topspin said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
There's also that thread about "venmo social feed is dumb". I mean, what's the problem with people knowing what you spend money on if you're fine with other people completely analyzing everything you do (including what you probably spend money on)?
I think that's a dishonest comparison. You might as well say that stores shouldn't know what I bought from them.
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@boomzilla said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
I think that's a dishonest comparison.
I don't. Both involve "why would I want unrelated 3rd parties to know that?"
You might as well say that stores shouldn't know what I bought from them.
Stores knowing what got bought to restock their inventory? Sure.
Stores knowing everything I bought from them? Maybe.
Stores knowing everything I bought from that and other unrelated stores? Certainly Not.Fun fact, assuming you mean physical stores: For most of my shopping they don't.
First, I use cash a lot, so they can't correlate one day's shopping to the next. Second, as far as I understand it at least, even if I pay withcreditdebit card they can't, because the payment is handled indirectly by some payment processor that won't give them trackable IDs.*Many shops offer this rewards card you can use to acquire rewards points, and that one allows them to completely know what you bought there and anywhere else you used that card. Obviously, I don't use that, even for non-privacy related reasons.
(* If I'm wrong with that, then maybe they can but aren't allowed to? I'm not quite sure)
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@topspin said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
You will probably point out how they're either:
I will pick door number five and say I'm not worried about these profiles because they're always inaccurate. Seriously, every time I review the "factoids" picked up it's always something like I'm a chain-smoking black lesbian living in Wales. I think even the ad networks know their profiles are bullshit, it's just snake oil for the advertisers.
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@heterodox said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
@topspin said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
You will probably point out how they're either:
I will pick door number five and say I'm not worried about these profiles because they're always inaccurate. Seriously, every time I review the "factoids" picked up it's always something like I'm a chain-smoking black lesbian living in Wales. I think even the ad networks know their profiles are bullshit, it's just snake oil for the advertisers.
This is my impression as well. I'm getting lots of women's fashion ads, because I was researching dress styles for an RPG setting.
And a bigger point is that they really don't care who you are, but only what they think you'll buy. And very little of that is personally identifying, and mostly anonymized. And the government doesn't need leaks to do harm, and the businesses don't have coercive power without breaking a bunch of laws already.
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@laoc said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
I think manipulating people's behavior at the whim of the highest bidder is very real harm.
Do you think that's a thing that happens? Do you think advertising "manipulates people's behaviors", or are you back to talking about a hypothetical?
@sloosecannon said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
I think the problem here is everyone has different definitions of the word "harm".
Right; but nobody considered those giant phone books literally everybody had in every home and business in 1995 as harmful. What changed?
@sloosecannon said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
To some, the ability for someone to track that kind of information is inherently harmful, and while, yes, that kind of information is available via other means, they would not like it spread further. That would be the "invasion of privacy" aspect.
I don't really get this either. What "privacy" did you expect Amazon to provide when you purchased legos? If you walked into a physical store and bought them, anybody would be able to watch you do it, it's a public location. They'd film it on their closed circuit cameras.
Why does this expectation exist online (apparently) when it does not exist in real life?
And now knowing this forum people are going to start declaring me to being dense on purpose, but I honestly don't know what changed or when. It confuses me no end.
@topspin said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
The question being addressed was how ubiquitous profiling matters, if you care about your privacy. Because that's what third-party cookies do, follow you everywhere and create profiles. Those were just different means of leaking personal information.
Right, but for the hundredth time, if there's no harm, then who cares? That's the disconnect I have.
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@blakeyrat said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
@laoc said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
I think manipulating people's behavior at the whim of the highest bidder is very real harm.
Do you think that's a thing that happens? Do you think advertising "manipulates people's behaviors", or are you back to talking about a hypothetical?
That's probably a research question, but at least the advertisers do think so. That's why the pay for impressions, not just clicks.
@topspin said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
Right, but for the hundredth time, if there's no harm, then who cares?You're just repeating that and ignore anything that discusses at least potential harm.
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@topspin said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
You're just repeating that and ignore anything that discusses at least potential harm.
That's because "the Nazis take over New York in 2018 and want to locate all the Jews" is fucking ridiculous.
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@blakeyrat From the guy who complains all the time about
and people putting words in his mouth, here come's something nobody ever said.
Just because the absolute worst-case isn't going to happen, that doesn't mean that surveillance power will never be used in any negative way.
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@topspin said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
From the guy who complains all the time about and people putting words in his mouth, here come's something nobody ever said.
Scroll up, it's in here. The only bit I added was the date 2018.
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@blakeyrat said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
The only bit I added was the date 2018.
That's pretty relevant when discussing "this has happened, historically" over "this is imminent".
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So for an on-topic discussion, can I invoice the EU for the ridiculous amount of time I've had to spend clearing out GDPR email notification spam in my very-American email inbox these past couple weeks?
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@mott555 said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
So for an on-topic discussion
@mott555 said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
can I invoice the EU for the ridiculous amount of time I've had to spend clearing out GDPR email notification spam in my very-American email inbox these past couple weeks?
I think that would open a whole new can of worms as that probably counts as doing business in Europe
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@topspin said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
as far as I understand it at least, even if I pay with creditdebit card they can't, because the payment is handled indirectly by some payment processor that won't give them trackable IDs.*
That is not true. I had Home Depot send me recommended items in a marketing email based on things I bought in the store. They had my email address because of a purchase I made online and they made the connection between debit card used on their website and debit card used in the stores.
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@blakeyrat said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
@gąska said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
EU has over half a billion citizens and 25 scum presidents.
Yeah but zero of those half-billion are competent enough to make a Euro-Google. Probably too busy bowing to kings or making really complicated fruit-and-cheese plates or something.
Don't forget sucking the pope's dick.
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@topspin said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
You're just repeating that and ignore anything that discusses at least potential harm.
I think there's a disconnect in what people consider "harm" to be because I haven't been able to figure out the harm here, either.
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@japonicus said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
The Nazis managed just fine without google.
But they did have IBM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
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@boomzilla I could've said the same when people doxed Blakey and posted his address or some shit like that. Where was the harm in that? Nothing bad happened, really.
Not that that's my opinion, I think that was beyond shitty. I'm just saying I don't want these companies tracking wherever I go, if you consider that harmless, good for you.
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@topspin OK, as long as we're clear, and I think that we are now.
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@mott555 said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
So for an on-topic discussion, can I invoice the EU for the ridiculous amount of time I've had to spend clearing out GDPR email notification spam in my very-American email inbox these past couple weeks?
If you can, tell us so that all of us Europeans can send invoices to the US for the time spent filling in stupid fat cats forms for banks.
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@blakeyrat said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
@laoc 52,000 is "literally thousands".
Do businesses own more cameras? Well duh. Yah. Every supermarket has a few dozen, every 7-11 at least a half-dozen, every McDonalds has a dozen or so. Naturally.
That doesn't change anything about my point and I make no apologies for my post.
Meanwhile, the question:
What real harm has occurred due to 3rd party cookies, or what realistic and plausible harm scenario could occur due to 3rd party cookies?
Goes unanswered. Instead of answering the question, all we get is factoids about how much data Google has or that Equifax is terrible. I just want a simple answer to my simple question. The fact that nobody can provide one makes me think the fear of cookies is simply irrational paranoia.
So far the only harm I've personally seen (based on the fact that I currently work for an advertising/marketing firm) is that the wrong people get the wrong emails from businesses attempting to utilize third-party cookies...as in third-party tracking and analytical tools such as Google Analytics. The reason for this is that in most cases the only way the tracking is useful is if a business has some means of logging into their website so they can correlate the tracking data to your user ID. It's damn near useless for anonymous traffic since all you really have to go on is an IP address unless there are forms on said website that can be used to correlate a name, email address or phone number to that IP address...but of course that's not reliable either.
With that being said...most businesses, even big ones, their data is complete crap, especially once you venture into the realm of franchised based companies and pyramid scheme companies (which have branded themselves as multi-level marketing companies...) or any company that has been in business for more than 10 years for that matter. More often that not we are hired with the belief that we can somehow take the 20 years of poorly stored and maintained personal data that has never been linked together by any means of user created login and turn it into a marketing gold mine for them. What it usually ends up being is a huge mess because they can never give us a unique 1:1 ID to email address or some other contact information for us to reliably use. What it results in are a lot of unsubscribes and complaints. Then we/I have to explain to them (in a less than direct manner) that their data was shit to begin and what do they expect. I could on for days about how shitty most business are when it comes to doing business...
The bottom line is, most companies have no idea who their customers are, have no idea how they've interacted with them in the past and make fools of themselves on a daily basis because of it. For example I had business class Internet access from Comcast for something like 15 years (just switched to gb fiber with AT&T) and I constantly received junk mail from them advertising to me either, business class Internet or even just regular Internet service of varying levels...usually worse than the service I already had. I constantly received phone calls from them that I ignored...and they have my information, supposedly know where I live and what services I have with them. Third-party cookies being used by these idiots isn't harming anyone in any major way. The only harm that could come of it is with the companies like Google who collect it and then try and correlate the data together trying to create profiles. Much like the NSA and the CIA. Sure they have all this data that seems like it fits together but the problems arise when you try and make assumptions about HOW it fits together...especially if you are looking for something bad...at that point everything you see is people doing bad things. So it's not the collecting of the data that's necessarily bad...it's how it could be used that's bad.
What should have been done is the elimination of third-party tracking services. Anyone that has a web server and a database doesn't need them anyway, that's a whole other discussion I suppose, since they already have the means to track what their customers are doing on their website, but then again most of them are WTF's in their own right which is why these third-party tracking services even exist to begin with.
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@topspin said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
things that are hypothetical, so they don't count
Somebody naming their kid Bobby"; Drop Tables; is a pretty unlikely hypothetical, too. Somehow, that doesn't stop us from worrying about the consequences.
So how about another hypothetical:
Ad network: "Hey ad-supported web site! That user that visited your login page at 01:23:45.678Z from IP 12.34.56.78 — how'd you like to know all the other sites he/she's visited that we serve ads to? For a small fee we'll give you the whole list. A slightly higher fee will get you all the really embarrassing adult sites he/she visited, too."
Shady ad-supported web site: "Cool! I can think a way to monetize the embarrassing info!"I think the potential harm in that should be obvious. Probably most reputable websites and ad networks wouldn't want to be involved with either end of that deal. But there's almost certainly somebody out there who would jump at the chance. The only difficult part is the scummy agency having enough reputation to put ads on enough sites to build the profile, but all that really requires is one trusted but untrustworthy employee at a reputable network.
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Oh and the greatest part about most of it...most of the time the tracking information these companies are gathering have no idea how to use it or simply never use it because they a) don't know how to use it or b) don't want to pay anyone that does know how to use it...so really all they are doing is supplying the tracking companies with free data.
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@hardwaregeek said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
Somebody naming their kid Bobby"; Drop Tables; is a pretty unlikely hypothetical, too. Somehow, that doesn't stop us from worrying about the consequences.
Yeah, but it's just a funny hypothetical of something very real that's been seen a lot in real life.
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Way more harm comes from the fact that most companies, including big ones, don't give a fuck about securing their data and that data gets leaked.
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Privacy discussions are pretty much one person's mountain is another's molehill from what I've seen.
@blakeyrat said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
I don't really get this either. What "privacy" did you expect Amazon to provide when you purchased legos? If you walked into a physical store and bought them, anybody would be able to watch you do it, it's a public location. They'd film it on their closed circuit cameras.
Why does this expectation exist online (apparently) when it does not exist in real life?I think the only real difference is that online monitoring is easier to automate. And existing laws are better established around brick and mortar monitoring.
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I'd have to say that, as per usual, GDPR is the result of politicians trying to solve the wrong problem with the wrong solution.
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@coderpatsy said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
Privacy discussions are pretty much one person's mountain is another's molehill from what I've seen.
@blakeyrat said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
I don't really get this either. What "privacy" did you expect Amazon to provide when you purchased legos? If you walked into a physical store and bought them, anybody would be able to watch you do it, it's a public location. They'd film it on their closed circuit cameras.
Why does this expectation exist online (apparently) when it does not exist in real life?I think the only real difference is that online monitoring is easier to automate. And existing laws are better established around brick and mortar monitoring.
What are these laws that you speak of? As far as I know there is nothing preventing a brick and mortar store from tracking the items I purchase or how often I come in to the store and just look around. In fact I've never signed a waiver as soon as I walked into a store asking for my permission to allow them to video tape me. Though they are required to state that a camera is present, but that's about it. But's those are there to look for thieves generally...I'm sure some business somewhere has tried using the footage to market to people, but most decided to go with the "discount" member cards...wonder how those things are going to be affected by all this non-sense? After all they are tracking everything you buy, when you buy it and how often you buy it.
Edit: Not to mention their point of sale systems track everything linked to credit/debit cards down to the date/time and what items were purchased...B&M stores have been tracking customers for a very long time and technically without any consent.
Edit #2: And before computers business owners used ledgers and, you know, their brains memory capacity. I imagine there are still good business owners that still do this and know what their regular customers business patterns are and even know their names. Let's take a ride on the slippery slope for a second...should a business owner now present to their regular customers that they should consent to them using their brain to store information about them? All this shit is just silly to be honest. Kind of like people freaking out because Netflix is storing data about the stuff they watch...yeah, how the hell do you think they know what to recommend to you?
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@blakeyrat said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
I don't really get this either. What "privacy" did you expect Amazon to provide when you purchased legos? If you walked into a physical store and bought them, anybody would be able to watch you do it, it's a public location. They'd film it on their closed circuit cameras.
Why does this expectation exist online (apparently) when it does not exist in real life?This is exactly true. In fact what Amazon as well as many other online stores and services do, makes sense. You, the customer are interacting with computers now instead of humans and the computers are doing the exact same thing the humans would be doing anyway. The fear is irrational and misplaced.
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@codejunkie said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
Let's take a ride on the slippery slope for a second...
I have a better one. Tell your local bartender you don't want him to track any information about you...yeah, see how long that lasts.
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@codejunkie You seem to be missing a matter of scale here. There's personal interaction, and then there's industrial processing.
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@blakeyrat said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
I think manipulating people's behavior at the whim of the highest bidder is very real harm.
Do you think that's a thing that happens? Do you think advertising "manipulates people's behaviors", or are you back to talking about a hypothetical?
Obviously. It's been researched for over 100 years. Robert Cialdini's "Pre-Suasion" cites heaps of research.
I think the problem here is everyone has different definitions of the word "harm".
Right; but nobody considered those giant phone books literally everybody had in every home and business in 1995 as harmful. What changed?
Why do you assume nobody did? You could opt not to have your number published (in Europe at least, dunno if AT&T, Bell & Co. used to be more coercive there) and quite a few people did. Especially women often chose not to publish a recognizable first name. So "nobody" is wrong is the first place. What changed is the prevalence of telemarketing and robocalls, and that thing called the internet that is slightly more convenient to use than a ton of dead tree.
Right, but for the hundredth time, if there's no harm, then who cares? That's the disconnect I have.
Do you think a peeping tom harms anyone?
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@blakeyrat said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
That's because "the Nazis take over New York in 2018 and want to locate all the Jews" is fucking ridiculous.
That's funny right after all the whargarbling about the literal holocaust about to be perpetrated on gun owners.
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@hardwaregeek said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
So how about another hypothetical:
Ad network: "Hey ad-supported web site! That user that visited your login page at 01:23:45.678Z from IP 12.34.56.78 — how'd you like to know all the other sites he/she's visited that we serve ads to? For a small fee we'll give you the whole list. A slightly higher fee will get you all the really embarrassing adult sites he/she visited, too."
Shady ad-supported web site: "Cool! I can think a way to monetize the embarrassing info!"Happens the other way round, too. "Hey, here's this user's HIV status and location, we trust you to only use it for Good™"
What could possibly go wrong?!
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@laoc I think you have me confused for someone else.
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@blakeyrat said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
@laoc I think you have me confused for someone else.
Sorry, I didn't mean to say it was your whargarbling. I think @Polygeekery, who for some reason seems to agree with you here, posted that link to Eric S. Raymond frothing from the mouth.
Meanwhile, the question:
Do you think a peeping tom harms anyone?
Goes unanswered.
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@laoc said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
You could opt not to have your number published (in Europe at least, dunno if AT&T, Bell & Co. used to be more coercive there) and quite a few people did.
Yes, you could definitely have your name/number unlisted. You had to pay an extra fee to keep it private, though. I think there was a fee, anyway; it's been a long time since I had a landline, and I never opted for being unlisted.
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@hardwaregeek said in A critical reflection on GDPR:
Yes, you could definitely have your name/number unlisted. You had to pay an extra fee to keep it private, though.
And I thought T-Com charging extra for caller ID info over here was the stupidest way for a telco to squeeze extra cash out of people. You had to pay for a company to not do something? The fuck?
