[elephant0xffff]

> [...] Now if you run a website in the EU, any user who signs up to it has control over the contents of your servers and you have to ask in extremely specific detail to do anything with some of that content, and that "consent" can be revoked at any time.

You are saying that's a bad thing?

Services that require you to sign up, should provide the possibility for users to look at, modify and delete their user data - that's all. Where's the problem?

[jimmaswell]

Yes, I'm saying that's a bad thing. Someone shouldn't have a right to come into my house and tear up a piece of paper in my drawer if I happened to write something about them on it.

The problem is that there's no justification for having the right to coerce other people just because they have information you gave them. If users enter names into your website, you're not allowed to run a statistical analysis of what names are most common on your website without asking. If people named Jane are more likely to eat ice cream, you can't target ice cream ads at them and help keep your site free, without asking them. Worse than just this kind of coercion of what you're not allowed to do, users can coerce you into taking time out of your day to expunge records about them. It's all entirely backwards.

[robin_reala]

The point of GDPR is to switch collecting users’ personal data from being a benefit to being a liability. That will absolutely cause short term pain to some companies that hadn’t expected this, but it ends up as a long term benefit to society, the same as most legislation.

[jimmaswell]

Do you have a source for most legislation being a long term benefit to society?

If forcing low-earning EU citizens off the internet because every website requires a subscription is a social good to you, then sure, it's a long term benefit.

[lovich]

Is the internet even a net benefit with this current trend towards turning everything into clickbait or some other psychological experiment to get traffic and harvest data off of it? How useful is the average website now compared to what the internet was like in the 2000's?

Even if it would all be a net benefit, why is it ok for all of these companies to be so misleading about it. No one out a simple EULA, for what is happening with the data. Hell half the agreements just say that the companies can do whatever with the data, but an average person does not have the ability to parse the output of the legal teams of every company they interact with every day. The only way this could get even close to an equal footing between users and companies is if every single person was a lawyer

[jimmaswell]

The rate of high-quality content being added to the internet has surely been on the increase as the adoption of the web increased, even if the likes of clickbait and spam grew faster, shifting the "average" quality down.

[lovich]

I don't agree with that at all. In the 2000s I frequently could find new and useful websites for learning on every Google search. Now I have to wade through hundreds of sites that only host clickbait or repackage other sites content so they can deliver ads that end up containing malware. The internet has given me a commodity in the form of constant good data that is unequivocally an improvement, but the signal to noise ratio on the web has gotten worse every year

[elephant0xffff]

> If people named Jane are more likely to eat ice cream, you can't target ice cream ads at them and help keep your site free, without asking them.

Apart from the fact that people named Jane aren't more likely to eat ice cream, you seem to criticize that it gets harder to target ads?

Oh no, that's a real pity. Oh no, poor webmasters.

[jimmaswell]

>Oh no, that's a real pity. Oh no, poor webmasters.

Why are the rights of people who own websites less important to you than the rights of other people?

Regardless, you might not still be saying this once half the websites smaller than Google become subscription-based in the EU or just block the EU altogether.

[corobo]

I didn't really realise it until the GDPR got into full swing but I'd much rather pay with money than with data.

What you're describing is a good thing. If you're going to treat my data like an almost stale slice of pie selling it off cheap to anyone who will buy it - Please do block my access!

[s73v3r_]

Why do you feel entitled to invasive tracking of users?

[jimmaswell]

Loaded question. I don't consider targeted ads etc. invasive.

[lovich]

Well it looks like an entire society decided that. Why does your view get to override theirs?

[corobo]

> Someone shouldn't have a right to come into my house and tear up a piece of paper in my drawer if I happened to write something about them on it

They don't have that right. GDPR only applies to business. If you mean you wrote it in your house for some business reason then yeah they have the right to know you've done so and why and the right to ask you to remove it if you don't need to have that information.

In no situation do they have the right to come into your house. That's a touch too far into the absurd.