Why GDPR is a Bigger Problem than Privacy
Digital privacy is a challenge. GDPR and its siblings make it worse. We need a reset. And then some serious effort to understand the problem. Something the GDPR creators never took the time to. Possibly the most expensive — and detrimental — ‘blind-leading-the-blind’ exercise of all time.
Tim O’Reilly’s article Data is the new sand was an eye-opener. A different, pragmatic and insightful angle on privacy, data, mindset and value. Without saying so, O’Reilly implies that our attempts to regulate privacy are worse than broken, even counter-productive.
To put it bluntly — and this is my take, not O’Reilly’s: What started as a quest for improved privacy is heading into a regime in which lawyers, politicians and bureaucrats compete for the right to rule, to define the rules and to protect something they don’t understand against threats they don’t understand — allegedly for our, the people’s — benefit. And to top it off, we — the people — don’t understand it either. It’s a blind leading the blind situation if we ever saw one. And it’s getting worse by the month. Every case that is litigated, regardless of location, is followed by scores of discussions, comments, analyses etc. from ‘experts’, journalists and politicians, about how bad the situation is, the need for improvement and the importance of the issue. The spiralling complexity gets another…
