GDPR is a scam

Full Title: The General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) of the European Union is a scam

Introduction

This is not a paper about enabling privacy for the citizens of any location on earth. It is rather a paper about the process that enables the representatives of the people to take the legitimate concerns of the people and draft legislation which does precisely what any set of rules always does, it benefits the interests of the organization that makes the rules. It often happens that the rule makers benefit when the people that select them believe that they rules are in the interest of the people, but that is only a side effect of the rule making process and never the primary goal of the rule makers. So it would be good to understand who will benefit from the GDPR. That will at least enable us to understand why the rules were written. We will then examine a different set of rules that were written with close attention paid to the people affected by the rules so that we can see how an alternate method can result in a better set of rules.

N.B. This paper was published on the date scheduled for the regulation to go into effect. Since the regulation depends on each nation in the EU creating supporting legislation, there is an expected delay coordinated all of those efforts. What is less well-known is that [ members of the electronics services continue their fight to weaken the GDPR]. Council negotiations have been slows by internal disagreements about how to respond to industry pressure to derail the regulation. The specific item that is under attack appears to be the need to acquire user's explicit consent before placing tracking codes on users' devices or collecting data about their communications. Given the fact that the protocols of the internet are now structured to require cookies to establish a consistent user experience over multiple information interchanges, the effect could be severe if some relaxation is not achieved.

Is the GDPR a Net Benefit?

Clearly the privacy of citizens of the European Union have been improved by this regulation. It is likely that the privacy of most citizens of the world have been improved by the spill over effect of multi-national corporations. But the following reports serve to show the downside of the regulation. Only time will tell if there will be a net positive benefit to the citizens of the EU as a result of this regulation.

The New York Times has reported a series of problems so far, and other reports are certain and will be posted here as time and interest permits:

• NYT 2018-05-28 "In Europe, New Battle on Privacy" states that "the legislation is so stringent that it could kill off data-driven online service and chill innovations."
• NYT 2018-05-27