As the world watches him flip flop over major topics like migrant families and trade war threats, I have to grant Donald Trump a point. Take all the nasty stuff he said about China on the campaign trail (before he started sucking up to Asian dictators) and apply it to the European Union. Obviously GDPR has not yet played on Fox news and he hasn’t figured out what the European Commission just pulled off. It unilaterally forced a ridiculous and extremely vague legal requirement on the entire planet!
“A Data protection officer (DPO)—a person with expert knowledge of data protection law and practices, must be appointed to assist the controller or processor to monitor internal compliance with this regulation.” Wait a minute. Just because a European citizen might click on my website, I have to hire some expert? And worse still, I am not allowed to ban Europeans from visiting my website or to show them a different version? Protectors of the internet should not be cheering GDPR, we should all be fighting it! This is a coup, or #thisisacoup if you want to make it a trending hashtag. You should want to if you care about the internet.
We have done our best to keep the internet free. We fight for net neutrality. And we are going to let some Euro-bureaucrats force vague and already technologically irrelevant regulation on the entire planet? GDPR is not about tech, your IT people can’t make you compatible. Neither is it a marketing issue. GDPR isn’t even a legal issue. How many lawyers do you know that understand databases or UI? GDPR is 100% political. Our national governments weren’t even asked, it is regulation instead of a directive. European citizens didn’t even get the chance to see it ratified in national assemblies. And – sorry to see this in writing – I am rather hoping Donald Trump notices some report on Fox news and helps us out this time around.
This is a coup.
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