Why the right to opt-out, instead of requiring sale of data to be opt-in?
I’m not sure how this stuff happens on the backend, but if I sign up for something and there is an opt-out page buried somewhere, I assume they’ve already sold my data by the time I can get to the opt-out page. I still make a best effort, but once it’s sold, it’s really too late. There needs to be an option to never sell it in the first place.
Google Sheets is slower/has enough usability issues it's not an option and OpenOffice is missing a few features too, not to mention neither really can do VBA at all, nor do they have PowerQuery. So Excel it is.
This annoys me with Apple devices, iCloud and all it's related backups of..well everything are on by default and it doesn't ask at any point in the setup of the device.
You have to then go into settings -> icloud and disable the main one and then like 30 individual ones.
There should be a big toggle at the top that says "Disable All Cloud Backups" they can feel free to throw in a warning.
The phone backup is one toggle. The 30 individual ones are for syncing data for apps.
If you aren’t using iCloud for any of this, why use it at all? I believe you can still use an iPhone without an iCloud account, can’t you? Without any cloud sync, I’m not sure what the value is, just sign out.
I’m sure you’d lose the ability to download apps, but most of those are also using iCloud to sync data.
For what it’s worth, Apple seems fairly decent about not opting users in to new stuff. When they released Messages syncing via iCloud, I had to explicitly turn it on for my various devices. The same was true for several other things.
> If you aren’t using iCloud for any of this, why use it at all? I believe you can still use an iPhone without an iCloud account, can’t you?
Nope, You have to have an apple account tied to a physical phone number or you can't sign in on the device or use it at all and they opt you in to the 5GB free plan and yes, the 30 sliders is apps but that doesn't alter the fact that I want to be asked before they exfiltrate my data, technology should exist to serve the user and part of that (at least in my opinion) is respecting privacy.
Yes you can sign out and you can untoggle the boxes but that is rather my point, it's opt out not opt in.
I don't want default exfiltration of data from my devices to a faceless American corporation without that been my choice.
> Bill sponsors Rep. Brad Paquette, R-Niles, and Sen. John Cherry, D-Flint, are now working with advocacy groups on potential replacement legislation, according to the MFEI.
It's an international coordinated effort to undermine every single citizen's privacy, an agenda being pushed for years, again and again in every country and state, by a coalition including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc., corporations that profit greatly from mandatory identity verification online. It's only a matter of time until they buy out enough politicians to push it through and force future generations to live under their panopticon. Same with digitization of money.
That coordinated effort also includes the buying up of US media sources by billionaires and gigacorps to control the content of not just news sources and social forums, but every electronic window we have onto the world.
Remember, the panopticon observed people who were in a prison.
I hate privacy, even down to the idea itself. I will buy out politicians, and push relentlessly until every trace of privacy is eliminated from the world. I love being watched. The idea of a panopticon makes me feel amazing and I want to force it on everyone until the end of time.
I'm reading your comment ad sarcasm, but I do have a non-sarcastic hot take on it.
If we have to live in a panopticon I think access to the data should be available to everyone. That eliminates the power imbalance and/or makes the idea of the thing distasteful to powerful people who might actually try to restore privacy and eliminate the panopticon.
It has reached the level of moral panic, so it’s the current topic everywhere.
Even on Hacker News, threads about children and social media or short form video will draw a lot of comments supporting harsh age restrictions, including an alarming number of extremist comments in favor banning under-18s from using the internet or phones.
It’s not until the discussion turns to implantation details that the sentiment swings firm negative. The average comment in favor of age restrictions hasn’t thought through what it would mean, they only assume that some mechanism will exist that only impacts children and/or sites they don’t care about.
As soon as the implantation details come out and everyone realizes that you can’t restrict children without first verifying everyone’s age or that “social media” includes Discord and other services they use, the outrage starts.
We’re now entering the phases where everyone realizes that these calls to action have consequences for everyone because there is no easy solution that automatically only impacts children.
People connect to the internet and do bad things (or have bad things happen to them)
They need to pay a service provider to have the capability to do bad things (or be exposed to bad things)
Why can't we just ask/compel the service provider to identify these people (or block the bad things).
For any politician the line of thinking will be something like that. It comes off as incredibly long hanging fruit that would have broad positive impact for the whole of society. Like the apple in the garden of eden, just walk over, take a bite, and you'll be a political hero without having to do much work at all.
It's not called a uniparty for nothing. Vote red, vote blue, we're all gonna end up in the same place eventually, the only difference is the timeline (pretty interesting that the first states pushing this stuff are California, Colorado, Illinois, etc. -- not exactly who you imagine being concerned with "think of the children", is it?). All the bickering between the two parties is pro wrestling kayfabe at the end of the day.
Maybe I'm just a cynical bastard, but after reading the article I can't help but agree. They saw the light way too easily and the sponsors didn't push back at all. That's how it's supposed to work, yeah, but it's a far cry from anything I've experienced in my entire lifetime. Something's up.
"We recognise you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore cannot grant you access at this time. For any issues, e-mail us at info@franklinnews.org or call us at (847) 497-5230."
This is extremely funny given it's an article about privacy concerns :)
A US based non-profit news organization isn’t going to spend money to pay lawyers to ensure they meet a regulatory burden that doesn’t affect their core demographic.
> A US based non-profit news organization isn’t going to spend money to pay lawyers to ensure they meet a regulatory burden that doesn’t affect their core demographic.
I like being covered by gdpr.
Though I really cannot see any country's gdpr peops taking anyone in the US to court.
A very simple "Fuck you" (along the lines of The Pirate Bay) would end any legal conversations.
It would be different if the news organisation had an office in the EU.
Anyway, i have a vpn, so....
I love seeing this, and love seeing regulations working exactly as wanted! What I see is basically "We're unable to serve this website without compromising your privacy, so instead of pretending or giving you a choice, we give you this message so you can turn around".
> "We're unable to serve this website without compromising your privacy... "
More accurately, "we do not have the staff or funds to figure out what every single random law around the globe requires of us, and since foreign countries are not a realistic advertising market for a local Michigan newspaper, there's really no reason for us to try."
Well, you don't have to do any of that stuff if you either are upfront about selling user data and ask if it's OK, or if you just don't do that stuff at all.
But to know that you would have to study the laws of other countries or in this case EU which costs money and in this case is not an obviously beneficial investment.
Why not? That continent is not their target audience.
It probably wasn't worth the effort to block foreign countries just from random unnecessary compute cost to serve a site to them, but when those countries start being serious about penalties you could face for serving their residents? Now it's justifiable to block non-US countries.
Also not a "European law" by any measure or understanding, that's a international organization that does police cooperation across the continent (and further), it isn't even a law enforcement agency... Not exactly sure how you could confuse that with laws, but here we are.
>since foreign countries are not a realistic advertising market for a local Michigan newspaper
This may be true for in house ads, but there are ad networks that already are able to personalize ads and have ad inventory for such foreign countries.
What does GDPR get you that browser settings and an extension don't? I'm genuinely curious how random websites refusing to serve content / spamming cookie banners is a good thing?
The data download and removal side of GDPR seems useful for more "entrenched" use cases where you have an account and a long history on a service but... fly-by website visits should not be this heavily regulated. Blocking cookies and scripts is trivial.
> I'm genuinely curious how random websites refusing to serve content / spamming cookie banners is a good thing?
They refuse to allow visitors to visit their website without taking, processing and selling their data and letting those visitors know that this is happening. That they outright block me instead of doing those anyways, clearly is a good thing and in my benefit.
I should not need extensions for a business to respect my privacy. It's as simple as that.
If you look at it through an equity angle, needing extensions relegates the negative effects to those that are already not "well off" — the technologically illiterate who don't know what to do or know someone who does.
So someone's refusal to make a couple clicks to install an extension necessitates: 1) millions of users having to click to get the annoying popup off their screen, 2) installing an extension to block those anyway, and 3) a more fractured internet where website operators outright refuse to serve content because of liability? I'd bet a very large sum of money that the technologically illiterate don't read anything on those popups and click "Accept all cookies"
Right... as if can trust some random American or other non-European website that it really respects the law. What are you gonna do if it breaks the GDPR law? GDPR ruined the Internet.
Why the right to opt-out, instead of requiring sale of data to be opt-in?
I’m not sure how this stuff happens on the backend, but if I sign up for something and there is an opt-out page buried somewhere, I assume they’ve already sold my data by the time I can get to the opt-out page. I still make a best effort, but once it’s sold, it’s really too late. There needs to be an option to never sell it in the first place.
It's so annoying. No means no, not "pester me later"!
You have to then go into settings -> icloud and disable the main one and then like 30 individual ones.
There should be a big toggle at the top that says "Disable All Cloud Backups" they can feel free to throw in a warning.
If you aren’t using iCloud for any of this, why use it at all? I believe you can still use an iPhone without an iCloud account, can’t you? Without any cloud sync, I’m not sure what the value is, just sign out.
I’m sure you’d lose the ability to download apps, but most of those are also using iCloud to sync data.
For what it’s worth, Apple seems fairly decent about not opting users in to new stuff. When they released Messages syncing via iCloud, I had to explicitly turn it on for my various devices. The same was true for several other things.
Nope, You have to have an apple account tied to a physical phone number or you can't sign in on the device or use it at all and they opt you in to the 5GB free plan and yes, the 30 sliders is apps but that doesn't alter the fact that I want to be asked before they exfiltrate my data, technology should exist to serve the user and part of that (at least in my opinion) is respecting privacy.
Yes you can sign out and you can untoggle the boxes but that is rather my point, it's opt out not opt in.
I don't want default exfiltration of data from my devices to a faceless American corporation without that been my choice.
> Bill sponsors Rep. Brad Paquette, R-Niles, and Sen. John Cherry, D-Flint, are now working with advocacy groups on potential replacement legislation, according to the MFEI.
https://archive.is/hI3wJ
Remember, the panopticon observed people who were in a prison.
If we have to live in a panopticon I think access to the data should be available to everyone. That eliminates the power imbalance and/or makes the idea of the thing distasteful to powerful people who might actually try to restore privacy and eliminate the panopticon.
Even on Hacker News, threads about children and social media or short form video will draw a lot of comments supporting harsh age restrictions, including an alarming number of extremist comments in favor banning under-18s from using the internet or phones.
It’s not until the discussion turns to implantation details that the sentiment swings firm negative. The average comment in favor of age restrictions hasn’t thought through what it would mean, they only assume that some mechanism will exist that only impacts children and/or sites they don’t care about.
As soon as the implantation details come out and everyone realizes that you can’t restrict children without first verifying everyone’s age or that “social media” includes Discord and other services they use, the outrage starts.
We’re now entering the phases where everyone realizes that these calls to action have consequences for everyone because there is no easy solution that automatically only impacts children.
They need to pay a service provider to have the capability to do bad things (or be exposed to bad things)
Why can't we just ask/compel the service provider to identify these people (or block the bad things).
For any politician the line of thinking will be something like that. It comes off as incredibly long hanging fruit that would have broad positive impact for the whole of society. Like the apple in the garden of eden, just walk over, take a bite, and you'll be a political hero without having to do much work at all.
"We recognise you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore cannot grant you access at this time. For any issues, e-mail us at info@franklinnews.org or call us at (847) 497-5230."
This is extremely funny given it's an article about privacy concerns :)
I like being covered by gdpr. Though I really cannot see any country's gdpr peops taking anyone in the US to court. A very simple "Fuck you" (along the lines of The Pirate Bay) would end any legal conversations. It would be different if the news organisation had an office in the EU. Anyway, i have a vpn, so....
More accurately, "we do not have the staff or funds to figure out what every single random law around the globe requires of us, and since foreign countries are not a realistic advertising market for a local Michigan newspaper, there's really no reason for us to try."
It probably wasn't worth the effort to block foreign countries just from random unnecessary compute cost to serve a site to them, but when those countries start being serious about penalties you could face for serving their residents? Now it's justifiable to block non-US countries.
Also not a "European law" by any measure or understanding, that's a international organization that does police cooperation across the continent (and further), it isn't even a law enforcement agency... Not exactly sure how you could confuse that with laws, but here we are.
This may be true for in house ads, but there are ad networks that already are able to personalize ads and have ad inventory for such foreign countries.
The data download and removal side of GDPR seems useful for more "entrenched" use cases where you have an account and a long history on a service but... fly-by website visits should not be this heavily regulated. Blocking cookies and scripts is trivial.
They refuse to allow visitors to visit their website without taking, processing and selling their data and letting those visitors know that this is happening. That they outright block me instead of doing those anyways, clearly is a good thing and in my benefit.
If you look at it through an equity angle, needing extensions relegates the negative effects to those that are already not "well off" — the technologically illiterate who don't know what to do or know someone who does.