[Tsubasachan]

If you work in tech or marketing your salary comes from eroding privacy. There is a lot of money at stake here and people don't vote against their interests.

Europeans aren't inherently better: if Facebook and Google were companies founded in Germany or France who knows if GDPR would exist.

[icebraining]

Europeans aren't inherently better: if Facebook and Google were companies founded in Germany or France who knows if GDPR would exist.

The Data Protection Directive, which the GDPR merely extends and updates, is older than Google and almost as old as the web itself, and was an attempt to unify even older national laws regarding personal data. It's not a reaction to having "lost" the privacy-eroding race.

[andrei_says_]

European politicians don’t have to spend 70% of their time begging corporations for campaign donation. I believe this is much more of a determining factor.

[jlarocco]

I don't know if I'd say that. "Tech" is a really big field, and most areas don't have anything to do with eroding privacy.

Unfortunately, many areas that would have been "safe" years ago, like games and standalone applications, are moving in the direction of violating privacy by phoning home and sending "telemetry" data, but there's still a lot of areas that are good.

[crankylinuxuser]

I'm a sysad for a small company. We have an on-prem solution and a social media app.

We don't sell our data. We don't trade it. And we adhere to a fedramp medium (in spirit), even though the social media site wasn't checked for that.

Users have control over their profile, and we admins cant even read it (unless we read raw DB, and we dont). And deletion requests entail in zeroing out all user's data. The next day, zeroed data is then purged completely.

Seriously, companies can do this right. And I work for one that absolutely does this right.

[laumars]

Europe has had data protection laws long before Facebook and Google we’re a thing. The concept of GDPR wasn’t invented because the EU were angry at American companies; it exists because there is a need for it. Just as previous incarnations of data protection laws existed in the EU before the web was a thing too.

Also I resent being told that anyone who works in tech gets their salary from eroding peoples privacy. I can guarantee you that hasn’t been the case for any of the jobs I’ve had in my career.

[Zecar]

Hi I work for a printing company as a full-stack developer. My work involves things like writing API wrappers to ingest order flow so our customers can print brochures, or building web UI tools to create and order print resources. The last algorithm I wrote was to generate 5000 unique BINGO cards. Please explain to me how my salary comes from eroding privacy.

[divideby0829]

I think we can agree that what you do and what your salary "come from" can be distinct and can be influenced by other things. There are engineers at FB whose sole job is maintaining REACT.js but they are paid from the money made from selling data.

Further, and I want to make it clear that I don't mean this as a value statement, but is a printing company what most of us really think of a the "tech" industry? and by extension does that really make you the subject of what you are replying to?

[Zecar]

There is a huge amount of tech in the print industry, believe it or not

[thewarrior]

The demand from these mega companies and their pay keeps your pay high.

[Zecar]

No it doesn't. We don't sell to any tech companies. We do like, manuals for baby seats and stuff like that.

[thewarrior]

It does indirectly because their demand inflated demand for programmer talent.

The money they have to acquire companies raises the valuation of all startups.

I’m surprised most people don’t realize this.

[renholder]

>If you work in tech or marketing, your salary comes from eroding privacy.

Your own inherent weakness in morality doesn't implicitly infer that this is the inherent truth for everyone else in the tech or marketing industry. (Perhaps, moreso for tech than marketing but I digress.)

Not everyone in either industry is inherently on the "I'm just in it for the money" bandwagon.

[irrational]

I work in tech, but my and my companies work definitely doesn't involve eroding anyone's privacy.

[zaarn]

People living in Germany and France think differently, if Facebook had been invented there, there is IMO a good possibility it would be less privacy-invading.

That plus there are good historical reasons for our strong privacy laws.

[foobiekr]

Not all tech comes from slinging ads.