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by thiht
1293 days ago
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You guys are unbelievable. Of course GDPR makes some things harder. It’s the whole point. GDPR is probably one of the biggest pro-freedom laws of the last years. Not big corp freedom for sure, but people freedom, and that’s GOOD. But Americans with their skewed vision of freedom just can’t see it I guess. Honestly if GDPR pisses off Americans, it probably means it hit on the nail. |
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Here's mine: "Freedom" is what you have in the absence of coercion. The freest state of being is being the last person alive on Earth. Freedom gives you nothing, because if freedom gave you something then someone else would have been coerced into giving it to you. Freedom also gives you the chance to do everything you need to do to survive and thrive.
In a society, we necessarily give up some freedom because my freedom to have stuff is threatened by your freedom to take it when I'm not looking (you would not have had that freedom in isolation). In more recent times, we have started to give up freedom in exchange for security, too, and everyone thinks that is worthwhile, although we disagree on how far you should go. The US military budget and all the government healthcare programs in the world are this kind of trade.
That's what GDPR is: it's a trade of freedom for the security of European sovereignty and European business (notice how I didn't mention privacy or user security). It's not about the "little guy" vs the "big corporations," the big corporations have plenty of money and lawyers they can use to comply. The people that all of these laws hit are the startups and small companies. This philosophy is why there are no European unicorns. Europe as a whole has given up the freedom to "start up" without compliance with a huge number of rules and regulations (or money to pay bribes). Uniquely, GDPR goes a step further and tries to impose this burden on everyone in the world, not just people and companies that have signed up for the European project.
In the European worldview, there seem to be a lot of "rights" exemplified by the UN human rights charter. These include things that nobody had 25 years ago, like "the right to high-speed internet." These "rights" and "freedoms" really aren't freedom: someone has to pay to provide them at the end of the day. For those of us across the pond, these are weird trades: you voluntarily pay incredibly high tax rates and huge administrative burdens for these supposed "rights," some of which look like luxuries to us, and feel as though they don't make you any less free.