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from the something-for-your-blood-pressure dept.
Under the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) any ordinary online Joe or Jeanette has the right to know which data are gathered about his/her activities. What's more, if a site wants to share those data with a third-party, it also has to clearly inform ya about those other companies, who in turn have to inform you about which personal data they're processing, with whom they're sharing those data and so on.
In short, turtles all the way down.
Yet that's a concept that apparently has zoomed right past the well-educated heads of such obscure companies like Oracle, Acxiom, Criteo, Equifax, Experian, Quantcast and Tapiad: just some of the data processors at the heart of the commercialized Internet.
Let's take a look at just two of them: Oracle and Acxiom.
Oracle [Data Cloud] sorts individuals into thousands of categories, based on more than 30,000 data attributes including newspaper readership, dieting, weight, ethnicity, charitable causes, online dating, politics [Pro 2nd Amendment Voters, Fiscally Conservative/Liberal, Likely Pro-Choice, Likely Supportive of Same Sex Marriage] and so on for 2 billion consumer profiles (drawn from 1,500 data partners).
Acxiom claims to cover 700 million people, with for example more than 3,500 specific behavioural insights for over 90% of UK households [Alcohol at Home, Heavy Spenders, Interest in Going to the Pub], while drumming its chest about its Personicx lifestage segmentation system and its LiveRamp IdentityLink: an identity graph which matches email and postal addresses, cookies, deviceIDs and, of course, phone numbers to individual 'consumers', merging both online and offline data.
They must be slightly envious towards Facebook's 52,000 personal attributes and 1.9 billion users.
Their curiosity piqued by such wildly optimistic messaging, the people at Privacy International decided to try out their rights under the GDPR. With some funny results: e.g. a data broker returning personal data as been provided by another data broker -- but that other data broker [Oracle] referring to an online (what else) tool only returning a blank stare. At least they made an effort, there: obtaining user consent was an interesting concept, for them data brokers do-gooders.
On November 8, Privacy International contacted data protection authorities in France, Ireland and the UK, and filed complaints against the 7 data brokers [Acxiom, Oracle], ad-tech companies (Criteo, Quantcast, Tapad) and credit referencing agencies (Equifax, Experian) mentioned.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Apparition on Thursday November 15 2018, @04:00AM (7 children)
... is why I blocked all EU IPs from my little itty bitty online forum, and added a bullet to the user registration agreement where people have to agree that they are not citizens of the EU should they get around the EU IP block. I've seen what it's done to other small online forums with people insisting that they have the right to delete their accounts and all of their posts. Uh uh.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 15 2018, @04:57AM (2 children)
So - signing up is for life? Or longer?
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Thursday November 15 2018, @06:15AM
Life, plus 70 years. Make it match mouse rules.
Or, if you're really mean, make it include you children, and your children's children, (plus 70 years, for the hell of it)
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by Apparition on Friday November 16 2018, @01:31AM
Signing up is for the life of the forum, whether that be five years, ten years, or a thousand years. Not one forum of more than two dozen I'm registered to allows people to delete their accounts. Only a few allow people to delete posts.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 15 2018, @07:04AM
California passed its own mini-GDPR earlier this year, which includes the right to have one's data deleted. Perhaps you need to block Californians too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 15 2018, @08:38AM (2 children)
God forbid people want to delete their accounts ..... oh noes!!
Speaking about deleting accounts, can you delete accounts on SoylentNews?
(Score: 4, Funny) by kazzie on Thursday November 15 2018, @09:08AM (1 child)
I've tried deleting "Anonymous Coward", but it didn't work.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 15 2018, @07:10PM
Oh, it did work. We just spawn faster than you can delete.