My GDPR pessimism

May 13, 2018

The latest great hope of various people, more or less including myself, is that the European GDPR will come along and put an end to various sorts of annoying email marketing activities and other intrusive ad and marketing activities. Under the GDPR, so goes the theory, companies like Yubico and Red Hat will not be able to abuse email addresses they happen to have sitting around to send marketing email; in fact they may not even have those email addresses sitting around at all.

(At least for people in the EU. The further great hope of the GDPR is that many companies affected by it won't bother trying to tackle the near-impossible task of figuring out who's in the EU and who's not.)

I'd like to believe this, but I'm not sure that I do. I'm not basing this on any examination of the GDPR or on what people have written about it. Instead, my pessimism comes from the cynical version of the Golden Rule. My simple observation that regardless of what they say, governments very rarely actually kill off entire decent-sized industries and slap large fines on a wide variety of prosperous and perfectly normal corporations who are conducting business as usual. It might happen, but it seems much more likely that there will be delays and 'clarifications' and so on that in the end cause the GDPR to have little practical effect on this sort of activity. If there is change, I expect it to happen only very slowly, as countries slow-walk things like fines as much as possible in favour of 'consulting' and 'advising' and so on with companies.

(In other words, a lot of stern letters and not many other effects. And I expect companies to take advantage of this to stall as much as possible, and to plead implementation difficulties and other things that tragically mean they can't comply quite yet. It may all be very theatrical, in the 'security theater' sense.)

Partly I come by this pessimism by watching what's happened with Canada's theoretically relatively strong anti-spam law. One of the strong features of this law was that it created a private right of action, where you could start a civil case against violators and thus you didn't have to depend on the official regulator getting around to doing something. Since Canada is a loser-pays legal system, this was always going to be a reasonably risky activity, but then in 2017 this provision was quietly suspended, including the charming quote:

The Government supports a balanced approach that protects the interests of consumers while eliminating any unintended consequences for organizations that have legitimate reasons for communicating electronically with Canadians.

This provision has yet to be revived, and there have been no 2018 enforcement actions by the CRTC under CASL (at least none that appear in the CRTC's public records).

It's possible that the EU will be more aggressive and determined about the GDPR and violations of it than Canada has been about our lauded (at the time) anti-spam law, especially in today's climate with increased public concern about these sort of issues, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

PS: It turns out that there has been some activity on the CASL front (and, and, and, and) and there may be good news someday. But if so, it will probably be significantly later than the already slow timeline that CASL itself specified. Applications to the speed of GDPR are left as an exercise for the reader.


Comments on this page:

By sam at 2018-05-14 03:05:44:

One factor you might be missing is that (some of) Europe doesn't view American technology giants as allies; GPDR compliance is potentially a big protectionist stick. If the most prominent targets, namely Google or Facebook, get swept up by it, it's entirely plausible that a norm against enforcement won't be developed. Also don't forget that the GPDR is being implemented by the states: it's not just one central agency in charge of seeking out violators, but 28 (well, 27 by the time anyone gets around to it), and the chance that some random member state will decide to take a hard line is not insignificant.

Written on 13 May 2018.
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