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FDR has always been one of my favorite presidents, second maybe to Lincoln. Both were men the establishment assumed were one of them until, to their horror, they governed like they weren't. Both could trash the opposition in one breath and take the moral high ground in the next. One of my favorite Roosevelt lines growing up came from Madison Square Garden, October 1936, standing before a crowd that included plenty of people who wanted him dead:Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.
What I love is that he doesn't argue with the hate. He doesn't say they're wrong to hate him, or that the hate is unfair. He says the hate is evidence. The process is working. I've always treated it as a metric: if you're doing something hard and nobody hates it, you probably aren't doing it.
If the right people hate it and those people happen to be some of the worst people alive, so much the better.By that standard, the GDPR (Europe's General Data Protection Regulation) is doing beautifully.The Cursed BannerIt is impossible to go anywhere in a technology space online without hitting a wave of commentary about how stupid GDPR is. It was written by bureaucrats who don't understand the amazing potential of unrestricted technology. These US-based critiques almost always lean on the oldest trick in cyberlibertarianism: we don't have time to regulate, we must simply adapt and ride the wave. Nobody has time for government.
Of all GDPR's consequences, none gets more attention than the cookie banner, which critics present as the inevitable result of government meddling. Blaming GDPR for the cookie banner is like blaming the health inspector for the roaches. The banner is deliberate vandalism, a dark pattern engineered to exhaust you before you can learn anything about the surveillance apparatus humming behind the "OK." Ironically the banner designed to hide the machine has taught the public more about the machine than a thousand podcasts ever will.
Even non-technical people stop at "your data is shared with 996 partners.""For a sports score website?"So why is the tech commentary community so loud about this? Because they understand what's at stake. If consent must be freely given and easy to refuse, the industry's power shrinks exponentially. People might decide who has their data, how long it's kept, and what it was collected for. You can only imagine how that thought keeps a Meta executive up at night when he's not eating endangered animals, or ignoring calls from his children whose names he has forgotten while on a tacky yacht. Consider the following example. Did you know Google was doing this every single time you searched on Google? Did your dad? So even in the most maliciously compliant form the regulation does provide value and information. Remember the hatred is the metric. How did we get here, where US tech companies end up regulated by Brussels? Why isn't the US government regulating US corporations anymore? If the rules are so terrible, why did nobody choose market exit? Has the EU become the world's "privacy cop" or, in the inverse, the biggest player to protect a fundamental human right to privacy? GDPR DayAh who doesn't remember where they were on GDPR Day. Since we're all socialists in the EU, we stood up from our government issued desks and gave the required three cheers for regulation, then resumed being on vacation for 6 weeks. Obviously after stopping by my free doctor on my way to the airport. On May 25th, 2018, GDPR took effect to the sound of American commentary, the way fireworks take effect to the sound of dogs.You can tell American CEOs were aware of the regulation based on the speed by which they copied the language from it. Right before it took effect Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, tweeted "We believe privacy is a human right." Tim Cook was right behind, telling CNN that "privacy is a fundamental human right". The framing of privacy as a human right is one of the key elements of the EU approach with GDPR. This is in stark contract with the US legal system which views information privacy as more of a market problem. You are all informed individuals in the wide marketplace of data exchanges and are left mostly to your own devices. In theory there should be regulations by the US of things like unfairness, deceptions and other market failures but in practice that doesn't happen. Europe is no stranger to this fight. The German state of Hesse passed the world's first data protection law in 1970, also known as the year the Beatles broke up, and set a standard we still fail to meet today:The records, data and results covered by data protection shall be obtained, trans-mitted and stored in such a way that they cannot be consulted, altered, extractedor destroyed by an unauthorized person. This shall be ensured by appropriatestaff and technical arrangements. LinkAt the launch of GDPR there were 126 countries with data privacy laws of some sort. sourceWhat you see with this sea of legislation is an overwhelming consensus that what GDPR was attempting to do was correct. In fact you see a pretty high level of global convergence of standards.
All 126 laws descend from the same commandments the OECD carved in 1980: collect only what you need, say what it's for, keep it safe, let people see and correct it, and don't be a creep about any of this.
Fifty years later, the American internet industry is still stuck on commandment one.So first the often-repeated sentiment that this is a flight of EU fancy is straight up incorrect. Something you could describe as the "European standard" for data privacy quickly became a global standard. Why Did GDPR Spread so Quickly?Anu Bradford calls it the Brussels Effect: Europe regulates, the world complies, because despite American bluster, Europe is a market nobody can leave.In the US financial market, companies who surrendered the EU market would have quickly found themselves with new CEOs as their previous leaders suddenly discovered health problems or a deep love of their families that they had ignored for years. Especially given the increasingly frosty relationship between the US and China, companies that were pushed out of China due to regulation and increased domestic competition cannot lose the EU market. It's also difficult to screen a lot of services for EU customers, especially because the laws follow the personal data of EU residents whenever and wherever the information is transferred outside of the EU. Think of it like trying to sort luggage based on what stickers are on the outside. The EU is also set up in such a way where enforcement of such a law becomes possible. Every member state has a Data Protection Authority, who are charged with assisting individuals in protecting their rights, advising domestic legislatures on the functioning of existing regulation and finally enforcing the law. The EU is also different from the US in that it is open to exploring precautionary regulatory action. We see this with the EU Artifical Intelligence Act which tried almost immediately to get some controls on the industry right at the beginning. Link So the combination of a robust option for enforcement combined with an increased appetite for regulation in general and a high level of respect for personal privacy made the EU the logical source for this legislation. Want to know what the teeth look like?
In 2011, an Austrian law student named Max Schrems asked Facebook for everything it had on him and got back 1,200 pages, much of it stuff he'd never volunteered. He filed a complaint from a dorm room. Four years later, the Court of Justice of the EU had voided Safe Harbor, the transatlantic data treaty, on the strength of it. A college student complaint killed an international agreement signed by presidents and prime ministers....multiple times.