Who'll guard your personal data post-Brexit? Britons should remain in the European Union to protect their data, says Rafael Laguna of Open-Xchange. He's not alone. "If the UK chooses to diverge its data protection laws from the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), it will become more difficult to export data to and from the EU and UK (without putting in place …
http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2016/05/06/google_ai_deepmind_nhs/
"Trust us, we're an advertising company masquerading...as a tech company... At the very least Google should be forced to make a statement about what it intends to do with the data it mines.... That can't just be left blank..."
"Laguna thinks that for all its faults, the superstate has done a better job of protecting data than individual states"
Pretty much tells us the authors view.
And let's recall what the UK has given the EU in return.
The EU Data Retention Directive. Written by data fetishists UK civil servants and introduced in a meeting chaired by Charles Clarke following a bomb explosion in Spain the Spanish were handling without it.
I think quite a lot of European data protection campaigners will be quite happy to see the UK "influence" on this subject end.
Too bad UK citizens can't end their civil servants involvement in their own affairs.
The GDPR is in effect now, but we've got until May 2018 to become compliant with it. If organisations aren't already applying or planning to apply at least some of the principles already, then they're quite likely to run out of time. Even if we vote Leave, we won't get out for at least two years so the GDPR will be being enforced before we've managed to exit the EU.
GDPR is called a Regulation, but to get it though in the time given it has at least 40 places where national variation is allowed (e.g. an age threshold somewhere between 13-16), and presumably in each case there's at least one state that will have a variant (otherwise they could have agreed a common line), so those expecting a single set of rules will be sorely disappointed.
The EU looks to me like a failed experiment in elitist political/corporate authoritarianism (Fascism) with stagnating, crony capitalist protectionism (via lobbied regulation), with the toxic side effects including reducing small business, uncontrolled immigration, mass fraud/waste (routine failed audits) and progressive usurpation of /our/ sovereignty, and it is already cracking, so we best leave and ASAP to significantly reduce our exposure to the growing fallout.
Many of the so called benefits either don't adequately compensate for the total costs, or are net harmful. We also need to leave so that we can recover the sovereignty and finance to better improve the UK too.
UK democracy looks to me like a failed experiment in elitist political/corporate authoritarianism (Fascism) with stagnating, crony capitalist protectionism (via lobbied regulation), with the toxic side effects including reducing small business, uncontrolled immigration, mass fraud/waste (routine failed audits) and progressive usurpation of /our/ sovereignty, and it is already cracking, so we best leave and ASAP to significantly reduce our exposure to the growing fallout.
We need to get back to a properly sovereign monarchy and disband our farcical parliament ASAP.
There we can all play the game if you like :-)
Geez Andrew, I thought you had enough fun trolling the global warming people, but obviously you've been allocated a new target to play with now.
Has El Reg sucumbed to a bit of click bait and attention grabbing with its spate of op ed's now most people have made up their minds?
I'd be voting remain by the way, having worked in and around europe for years, and benefited massively from all the benefits it brings having got on my bike literally as norman tebbit told us to.
If you can't provide a credible citation to a wild claim ("surrender the right to govern ourselves" is right up there with that thing about "child's birthright" crap I saw on Faceache the other day), then to you, I say fsck off and die.
Same goes for both sides.
In this particular case, it's not that our politicians are incapable of passing an equivalent law, and more to do with the fact I wouldn't trust them with a bucket of water if my genitals were on fire, let alone to make the right decision about my personal data.
Why would you want to spend the effort, time and money drafting an equivalent law? It'd be the same thing, only it 'll say 'British Data Protection Regulation' instead of "European". Same goes for every other piece of legislation we need to replace. They already exist, and assuming we want to deal with Europe in any way then we'll have to the same in all but name, allowing for fairly minor amendments acceptable to the EU.
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