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by guitarbill 2627 days ago
Don't read this. There's so much misunderstanding in this article, I'd be surprised if any good discussion came from it. And refuting it would take ages.

For example:

> And apparently typing your name, age and other information is not consent. How is this supposed to work by the way? I give you my name but I don’t consent to you using it or remember it?

The way it's phrased is misleading. If you need the data and are going to use it in the obvious way, e.g. for shipping a parcel to my address, legitimate interests works fine. If you're a scumbag marketer or data broker/reseller (etc), then yeah, it's going to impact you. That was the idea.

So instead of bikeshedding arbitrary scenarios, let's do something more productive with our day.

4 comments

The better response to "typing is consent" is that, okay, you gave our address, now we're creating adverts with your house, making it look like you're selling it, soliciting offers in your name, and so on. Even though you just ordered a bumper sticker from us.

So, consent is given for a purpose, and you can't really do that with just an input box. Hence the fancy opt-in modal dialog wizard thingies, and the checkboxes at registration/payment time, and so on.

Couldn't agree with you more. Just another Medium post, presented as factual news, steadily leading me to just... Never read posts from Medium.
You can't refute a "feeling" anyway as it is subjective.

I saw the headline and thought I'd verify my suspicion here in the comments (Confirmation Bias!) before spending my time on the article.

It's worth reading. It will remind you of the rule of law; that we all should follow the laws because it makes society better. You can speed your car down the road and there is no mechanism to prevent you from breaking the limit, but most people don't do this because they respect speeding laws and why they were created.

Same thing here. Yes GDPR has no mechanism to enforce these things. It's up to everyone to respect the law and enforce it upon themselves. If you don't respect laws, then you don't respect 'em, simple as that. Eventually, you will get caught.