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.
Just when it became technically feasible to autodecline in all kinds of cookie banners with AI enabled browsers/browser plug-ins…
Oh no
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.
Frankly, that’s a stupid ass take.
Reality is not binary, we progress and evolve. The constant pressure to be better than yesterday is the reason we got where we are.
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.”
Yeah, the malicious compliance was what should have been regulated instead. Ban the annoying cookie popup and require sites to make it opt-in by default. At most, sites should be allowed to have an option in a burger menu to allow cookies, and clicking that button would open the popup to specify which cookies you wanted to allow.
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.
Contacted 3 MEPs that seem sensible enough to oppose the suggestion.
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??
I think the point is that the EU isn’t participating in the software industry, including AI, at all.
My grandpappy started this here AI company with a handful of GPUs he whittled himself, and I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let big gobmint regulations cost us the family business!
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.
Could you name a few?
Legally there are no Corrupt EU Commissioners. To be deemed Corrupt there would have to be actual evidence of Corruption (such as recordings of meetings were they explicitly promised to use their power in a certain way, in exchange for some form of payment, which normally only the Police has powers to obtain), them being subsequently charged and a Court Of Law convicting them for the crime of Corruption.
None of them was ever just investigated for Corruption, much less convicted so pointing fingers at any one of the them explicitly and saying that they’re Corrupt would be Libel, which in my country (which by the way, is pretty Corrupt, with actual ex-government members convicted of Corruption) is an actual Crime prosecuted by the local Prosecution Office, not merely a civil lawsuit for damages.
So if I was to name names, I would be putting my head of the block for the Crime of Libel. Obviously I’m not going to do that.
What there is are various coincidences of EU Commissioners which acted in very positive ways towards certain industries and then after leaving the Commission went to work for those Industries making a lot of money, even thought they had no background in them (never before had worked in said Industries, no Educational training for said Industries).
Since the police never investigates it, all there are are such coincidences of commissioners ending up in gold plated gigs in the industries they helped whilst they were commissioners.
I’m not going to put my head of the nose for you by naming names (I’m not a Legal expert so don’t want to risk committing the Crime of Libel by doing so). I suggest you start by looking into were the EU commissioners during the 2008 Crash (during which the commission was very pro-Finance) ended up working afterwards.
So if I was to name names, I would be putting my head of the block for the Crime of Libel.
“Hello I’m an anonymous person on the Internet and if I say anyone’s name I will literally be murdered, so you just need to Do Your Own Research”
I personally know a person who was charged and convicted of the Crime of Libel (in what for my country was an incredibly speedy legal process) for accusing a local politician of Corruption.
Curiously, about a decade later said politician was convicted for Corruption. Lets just say it only happened because that Libel conviction really pissed of that person who had time, brains and no fear of their professional life being affected, so they worked tirelessly behind the curtains to push an earlier report into “irregularities” in his City Hall all the way into and as a case against him, including digging evidence even from abroad and having to threaten with exposure in the Press at least 3 public prosecutors who on different occasions were quietly holding the case so that it didn’t get to court before the deadlines for prosecution expired (and even then that politician actually got away with a number of crimes because the deadlines for prosecution did expired for those). In fact that was the first politician ever in my country convicted of Corruption.
Libel having been made a Crime in my country (which is quite unusual in the World) was done exactly so that people can be punished for openly accusing the powerful of malfeasance without the powerful having to bare the costs for a civil court case and actually prove damages (so it mainly helps politicians in the big parties who have the connections to get the local Public Prosecutions Office to take the case to court) and that’s exactly how it has been used.
By an amazing coincidence my country is one of the most corrupt countries in Europe and last I checked was the one most behind in implementing the EU advised anti-Corruption measures.
I didn’t ask for ”corrupt comissioners”, but those who have moved from comission to those positions. There is nothing illegal in pointing those out.
Well, for merely commissioners that moved from the commission to those positions, the first example that comes to my mind is the head of the EU Commission during the 2008 Crash and it’s aftermath, who went to Goldman Sachs afterwards and is still there today as a non-executive president.
During his time in the Commission they were very pro-Finance in the way they handled the aftermath of the Crash with him personally pushing frequently for measures were EU money was used to unconditionally helped the interests of large Financial Industry companies, and Goldman Sachs is one of the largest companies and massively benefited from, amongst other things, near-defaulting Greek Treasuries being bought from the private sector by the EU, which subsequently forced the Greeks into Austerity to as much as possible pay those Treasuries.
There’s even a scandal with him were, whilst working at Goldman Sachs, he broke the EU rules on lobbying by using his access card to EU buildings - which he was entitled to have as an ex-Head of the Commission - to simply enter into those buildings and waltz over to the offices of sitting EU officials to lobby for Goldman Sachs. The EU ended up revoking his access privileges, the first and only time that has happened for an ex-EU Commissioner.
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.
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.
True.
That is however a pretty hard and time consuming change, so to me it makes sense that in the meanwhile we take steps to reduce the harm caused by the system still in place, not least by cracking down hard on Corruption and Conflicts Of Interest and closing the legal loopholes that allow certain politicians to stay within the Law whilst purposefully using today the power they have been delegated to do favors for others who have promised them monetary payback for it tomorrow.
If you’re drowning now you don’t put all your hopes on the ship that might be coming but isn’t even visible yet.
that’s not to say we lose sight of the goal though!
people have made a similar mistake multiple times before!
Every goddamn day there’s some new BS showing up.
more like: every goddamn day the newspapers only report about the bad things that happen, because good things make no money.
Well shit, do we EU citizens have any say in this ?
I believe the EU Parliament has to approve this so they can block it, and that’s elected by Proportional Vote and we all have MEPs there who, unlike national parliamentarians in countries without Proportional Vote (which are most of them) have to worry more about the public opinion in their nation turning against them.
So if this shit ever makes its way to the EU Parliament (were the EU Commission will try to make it pass quietly), contact your country’s MEPs and show you’re well aware of it.
I did contact 3 MEPs from the comitee belonging to “Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs” and seem sensible enough to oppose that.
Contact your local MEP. Ask your local MP or Deputy or whatever you call them to push the relevant minister to oppose it. It’s not great, but you do have a say.
lol sure
Have we ever?
Yes. It worked with Chat Control (even though it wouldnt have passed anyway. Didnt even go to voting.)
It didn’t go to voting because it wouldn’t have passed, and it wouldn’t have passed because of public backlash causing important countries for the vote to back out.
Your comment makes it sound as if it wouldn’t have passed without public backlash
I guess Daddy Trump gets his wish afterall. Spineless cowards …
Here’s the un-paywalled link: https://archive.is/je5sj
Make those motherfuckers’ phone lines burn!
Fascists in council. Only one way to deal with those…
What about this is fascism?
Anything you don’t like can be called that.
I can think of a few. Always the same outcome tho.
Omfg, is there anything that we can do?
Vote wisely.
…
No no just kidding whatever your vote is it doesn’t matter in the end
This message brought to you by anti-democracy coalition. “Anti-democracy coalition - whatever you do just please don’t participate in democracy”
Whilst I do not agree with the spirit of the message of the previous poster, I must point out that specifically the EU Comission - from were this came - is not elected but nominated, and the nomination is one big horse trading shit show several levels removed from voters, were everybody but the head of it is chosen by the Council Of Ministers (which only represents EU National Governments , not National Parliaments) so the whole thing is maybe slightly more “democratic” than nominations for the Chinese Politburo.
(If there is one thing that needs changing in the EU political structures, it’s the crooked, rotten shit show that’s the EU Commission).
That said, the EU Parliament which can stop most of this shit, is elected and it’s even via Proportional Vote so there is no mathematical rigging at all to make some votes count more than others (unlike in First Past The Post Power Duopoly countries like the US or Britain) and hence voting in the EU Election does matter.
As much as all of us may hate it - it’s true. The only scenario in which democracy functions is one where all, or at the very least the majority of voters make their own decisions, based on objective information. This is not the case.
While it’s always great to contribute, no matter how little, we cannot deny reality here. Your vote is welcome and appreciated, but the truth is it won’t change anything. Voting only gets you so far when the vast majority of people are brainwashed and just pick whatever their media outlet of ‘choice’ tells them to pick.
You don’t know how the European Union is run. This not even a representative regime
This bullshit needs to stop. Grow the fuck up
Ah yes, just keep voting, it will work this time, I swear!
Or take a page from the yellow vests, make them piss themelves.
Yeah, not voting works super great to keep the fascists out of power, just ask the Americans!
One without the other is never enough
Or you know, in case I have to spell it out.
Just straight up tear up the government, no voting necessary.
Guess I’ll kms lol
