this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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The year is 2023, every single major tech companies are racing each other to become Public Enemy No. 1. And the only Hero we have is the EU, will it be able to save the day?
Don't have too much faith in the EU. Corporations are still heavily influencing politics. They will probably come with half assed laws that have loopholes or workarounds.
Like GDPR?
/s
I don’t get the “/s”.
The #GDPR is absolutely a perfect example of ½-assed laws & loopholes. I have filed reports on dozens of GDPR violations; not a single one of them lead to enforcement. The GDPR is just a prop to make people feel comfortable as the EU destroys the offline infrastructure.
I did as well for the Catholic Church. I don't want to have my name associated with a gang of child molesters so I invoked the right to be forgotten. The church told me that baptism is sacred and cannot be undone. The Dutch institution for GDPR claims never did anything about it because they're overloaded with requests.
Oh well, I'm not willing to give it more energy either. It's mildly annoying but doesn't affect my day to day life.
Maybe you misunderstand the enforcement part of the GDPR. It's not made for you to get personal enforcement out of it. It works on the basis of multiple infractions being recorded and then escalating the agencies response level.
I work with many companies as IT consultant and I can assure you, that they all FEAR the GDPR and treat natural person data very well because of that. Enforcement of GDPR does happen and you can review every enforcement on a public website called enforcement tracker. There are almost 1980 enforcement actions in their database.
I have also personally requested information about me and my family through the rights bestowed by the GDPR regulations and have EVERY TIME gotten the information within 30 days.
You obviously have not read article 77. This article entitles individuals to report GDPR violations to a DPA for enforcement. Article 77 does not distinguish violations against an individual (which I suppose is what you mean by “personal enforcement”) and violations against many. Some of the violations I have reported can only be construed as violations against the general public. E.g. an org fails to designate a DPO.
The problem is there is nothing to enforce article 77 itself. When a DPA neglects to act on an article 77 report, there is no recourse. There is only a provision that allows lawsuits against the GDPR violators. But then when someone did that, and then claimed legal costs, an Italian court decided for everyone in a precedence-setting case that legal costs are not recoverable. Which essentially neuters the court action remedy. So we have an unenforced article 77 and a costly & impractical direct action option.
It’s not even doing that much, in some cases. The report has to get past the front desk secretary and be submitted into the litigation chamber before it’s even considered as something that would indicate a trend. If it doesn’t get past the secretary it does nothing whatsoever. Some of my reports were flippantly rejected by a pre-screening secretary for bogus reasons (e.g. “your complaint is ‘contractual in nature’” when in fact there is no contractual agreement, apart from the fact that the existence of a contract does not nullify the GDPR anyway).
So you’re only seeing the commercial response. Gov agencies & NGOs are also subject to the GDPR, which is where you see the most recklessness (likely due to the lack of penalty). On the commercial side banks also don’t give much of a shit about the GDPR because when they violate it there’s a shit ton of banking regs they point to and the DPAs are afraid to act against banks because of the messy entanglement of AML/KYC laws that essentially push #banks to violate the GDPR.
Indeed I’ve browsed through the enforcement tracker. It’s a good prop for making the public believe that the #GDPR is being well enforced. They are cherry-picking cases to enforce to convince the public that something is being done, but people who actually submit reports know better. We see the reports that are clearly going unenforced.
I have had article 15 access requests denied which I then reported to the DPA, who opened a case but just sat on it. For years, so far.
(edit) By the way, I suggest you leave Lemmy·world for a different instance. If you care about privacy at all, you don’t use Cloudflare nodes. I cannot even see the msg I wrote (which you replied to) because #lemmyWorld blocks me (which I give some detail here: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/1435972). I had to reply to you based purely on your msg without context.
Forcing this might very well be something EU opposes. While there is a lot of corporate lobbying, Google would be forcing everyone to either use chromium or make compatibility changes into other browser. While not a total monopoly, it still limits the options radically. Therefore there might be hope that EU forbids this type of action. Let's see...
It’s bizarre that you think the EU market it small enough to be dispensable. When GDPR came into force, many US sites had to reject EU traffic. But that was only temporary for the most part. They knew it wasn’t smart for business to exclude the EU so they got their compliance issues sorted.
I would love that actually. But it’s not reality. In reality what happens is the search engines deliver a shit-ton of unusable garbage results that I would rather not see. E.g. sites that block Tor users, CAPTCHAs, giant cookie popups, etc.
If a search engine were to filter out the garbage, it would be a great start to solving the shitty web problem.
Don't worry there are others than Google on the market also. If they want to make space for competition it's actually a good thing.
The EU has a larger population than the US, that's not a market you just leave. Also, Europe is not the same as the European Union.
The EU has a PPP GDP of $24.05 trillion compared to the US' $25.4 trillion. That is a market of significant size and leaving it will affect Google's bottom line.
You can compare Alabama and France all you want, that is irrelevant. Or should I perhaps start comparing Mississippi and Luxembourg?
Lastly, I don't know if you've noticed but Google isn't the only search engine in existence. Bing, Qwant et al. will gladly fill the void that Google leaves behind.
We already can't due to Google's pushing of irrelevant promoted sites and failing to take meaningful action against SEO in recent years.
Hope you enjoy being laid off when your company eats itself to keep the growth going for just a little longer to please the capitalist parasites known as "shareholders". You can't much money from ads when the economy is utterly, utterly in the shitter like it is right now, not nearly as much as you used to. You really think that the average person has the financial leeway to buy luxury goods or pricier options shown in ads when the budget barely covers food, bills, rent and transport costs, and everything they do buy must be the cheapest thing they can get their hands on? Your company, and all other internet companies supported by ads, made a pact with the devil, and now he has come to collect his due. I will enjoy seeing you all go hard into the red.
What economy are you living in? In the US at least inflation is down, real wages are up, GDP and the stock markets are up, employment numbers are stellar...even income inequality is trending the right way. The only thing that's "bad" is interest rates, and there's an argument to be made they were too low to begin with before.
One where the average rent has now eclipsed the average mortgage repayment, and where all we export to the rest of the world is raw resources that are less in demand than ever
I get by fine with Duckduckgo and Ecosia, thank you very much.
Google's recruiting standards must've dipped because I can't fathom a Googler would be this ignorant. You know there are competing search engines, right?
You're right, Google and Bing are the only two search engines in the world. Trolls gotta troll, I guess. Blocked.
Thinking about it, a lot of these companies created astounding products on a relatively unusual business model of delivering for free (not totally unheard of, tv for example but still not the most traditional way of doing business) and absorbed, cannibalized or destroyed a lot of other services and functions with their ubiquity and unbeatable price.
The way they say it was funded was through advertising, but nonetheless much of the big banner services remained unprofitable for years or even decades. Sometimes the master plan is to get everyone hooked (users and advertisers) and then when they have little choice anymore, start making things cost, a lot more. The trouble with this though is that none of them are the only one's doing it and even with only a handful of big titans controlling it all, there's still the risk of one of your tech bros stealing your lunch when your start trying to cash-in and piss of your users and your customers alike so really I guess all of them doing it at once kind of makes sense. Kind of a "I'll jump when you jump" mentality and at least one has jumped. I somewhat wonder if they all planned to go this route at around the same time together or if they all just concluded that the short term gain in market share by taking advantage of one of them jumping wasn't worth the risks from the intense competition and just decided to instead cash in at the same time.
Or I'm just rambling and have no business sense or idea what I'm talking about. It just seems that might explain why this all seems to be coming to some kind of a crescendo at about the same time.