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Comment by goodpoint | Hacker News Reader

> Did we consider that if everyone is breaking the law, the law itself might need a rework?

No, GDPR is doing tons of good works.

The whole web is a privacy and security nightmare and we've been tolerating this mess long enough.

Many companies are engaging in malicious compliance by annoying users with popups and push the blame onto GDPR.

The reality is that 99% of websites need zero cookies, zero popups and no logging of IP addresses. The ones requiring login can set a login cookie without pestering the user.

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Exactly, everyone’s still breaking the law, but it’s not a binary thing. They’re breaking the law much less now, and they’re being much better about documenting the ways in which they’re breaking it than they were previously.

Sure, but you have to also accept that there are aspects that have made the internet a worse experience without actually improving the situation from a privacy point of view.

To be fair, the GDPR does outlaw all the things we find annoying with the cookie banners (or rather, data processing consent flows, as they cover more than just cookies).

The problem is continuous lack of enforcement and distinct lack of billion-dollar fines everyone was fear mongering about, which allows companies to passively-aggressively pretend to comply by making their banners annoying on purpose to mislead people into hating the GDPR.

This problem would be resolved overnight (and everyone's privacy increased by orders of magnitude, since spyware would become illegal again) if those fines actually started coming down.

Billion-dollar fines can only happen if the company in question had a revenue of €25B per year and was hit with the maximum fine. But either way, enforcement is absolutely happening: https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ has over a 1,000 rulings in its DB.

It's not enough. That link gets posted all the time but it just shows that over 4 years, across all companies, the total fine amount is just over 1Bn. How much does Google or Facebook profit from non-consensual data processing in just a single year?

Clearly the EU wants to give companies the time to adapt.

Internet privacy has been a laissez-faire dystopian wasteland for decades.

Even with the current very gentle enforcement, GDPR has received a lot of push back and called draconian (by those who benefit from corporate surveillance).

> The problem is continuous lack of enforcement

Yeah, but it's hard to enforce a law at scale when the difference between legal and illegal behavior is not obvious to a layperson. The law is too technical.

It also has shouldn't have options where a user can simply allow further data collection, since this makes it hard clearly say whether a certain practice is legal or not, since it "will depend".

This creates more friction to enforcement. If things were more clear-cut, enforcement could be automated, and you would probably see those fines roll out.

It is harder to say "this software library is illegal to use in the EU" if there are certain circumstances where it's not.

> ...the difference between legal and illegal behavior is not obvious to a layperson.

GDPR and cookie law is not hard to understand, so that excuse is a little bit lame to be honest. Besides, if you really need to understand what you must do by law, you should hire a lawyer. That's the same as with any other law.

Ok fair enough.

What I meant to say was that pressure to enforce laws only happen if there is public pressure to see the law implemented, and when the concepts are too abstract/intangible, the public disengages more easily from the issue.

Political will for improvements and funding is more likely to happen with more public support as counter to the influence of industry lobbists.

Public support is easier to rally when people can personally relate, or ideally share a pain point. A good candidate would be the annoying pop-up boxes. Frame them as dangerous because increasing the risk of online data and identity leaks. Solution to this threat to public security is to eliminate them by default answer. Simple law proposal.

Yes, there are aspects that have gotten worse, but all those aspects are companies breaking the law in question.

And no, privacy actually is improving.

And enforcement is ramping up.

We still have a way to go, but we're moving in the right direction.

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