This whole conflict is fascinating as someone who has worked a lot with GDPR compliance.

On one side you have the EU who wrote a hilariously incomplete regulation. The authors seemed to presume that if a user did not consent to tracking, making that user less valuable to ad-supported services, they would simply get to ride for free. In theory you could run an ad supported service but it was impossible to know if you had collected consent “correctly” until someone took you to court.

On the other hand you have American tech companies who seem to be operating under some sort of “the EU isn’t real” mandate. Since US companies run the ad exchanges and effectively set the rules, the pressure was placed on websites and services to use whatever dark patterns they could to collect the same amount of information as is being collected about Americans (which is to say every conceivable piece of data on earth).

Then AI comes in, a technology fundamentally incompatible with GDPR. It can’t tell you what it knows about you, you can’t correct wrong information and you can’t really withdraw consent as you never gave it in the first place. But the EU is spooked by slow economic growth and doesn’t want this to turn into another smartphone market it completely loses out on.

The end result is this rolling clusterfuck of confusion. #eu #gdpr https://mastodon.social/@macrumors/115578840880247568