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 slowed 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 Advertising Evil?

Monopolization of information flows has worked to the advantage of oligarchs as long as history has recorded any thought about the value of information, or intelligence as it is sometimes known to the oligarchs. The information revolutions, printed books, radio broadcasting, and now narrow-casting on the internet, have all been faced with paying for the medium of exchange. Books were originally modestly expensive and hard for the general population to afford until free lending libraries were established. Newspapers have relied on advertising more that cost of the paper for as long as they have been popular. A similar problem faced radio until the advertising potential was realized and then exploited. From the beginning of the World Wide Web (which is now synonymous with the internet) the prevailing mantra is that "Information want to be free". This idea flies in the face of all history but sounds like a good thing. The trouble was that someone must pay for the internet, a fact that seems to have been conveniently overlooked by the freedom lovers of this current age.

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