It would also be nice if people could stay longer in the work force. The way I read the results, recipients had more access to health care, abused substances less and had more time to recover after work.
Having an hour less in the work week should be balanced against being productive for longer.
We used to worry about trackers duplicating and profiling our player base back when we were running multi-billion dollar mobile games. F2P monetization being the long-tail beast it is, you really worry about ad platforms understanding your revenue dynamics. It was actually the managers who were worrying about trackers rather than the other way around.
I don’t know if you can find a similar argument in your industry, but losing the long tail to customer profiling can be a good string to pull.
That Addendum has caused considerable consternation among game developers and — to my knowledge — few are prepared to sign it.
The main points of contention are:
- the technology fee (the cost of advertising has already cut badly into their margins in the wake of identifier reform);
- the clause making the Addendum also binding on any corporate parents and subsidiaries — the game industry is pretty consolidated and this limits the options for independent game studios which are also subsidiaries;
The fee is particularly nasty for hypercasual games, where a very realistic scenario has you paying for millions of installs, only to find your monetization lacking and you paying additional fees to the platform, of all things.
There are very real concerns with the Addendum and making signing only about Epic’s bona fides is reductive and wrong.
There have been 50,000+ complaints filed with various data protection authorities since G-Day (1), Google recently got a hefty fine for a non-conformant consent implementation (2) and a lot more are rolling in country by country as bureaucracy grinds (3).
There have been a few fines, including the large 50M EUR fine against Google. Despite this, compliance has fallen short of many peoples' expectations. Being presented with consent dialogues where it is not possible or practical to decline consent is still commonplace.
Hopefully the rate of enforcement will further increase and compliance attitudes will improve.
Despite this, compliance has fallen short of many peoples' expectations.
Indeed. Are the following two statements true or false?
1. Major data hoarders, including online giants like Facebook and Google and traditional data brokers like credit reference agencies, are still hoovering up huge amounts of personal data and processing it in ways that some or all of the data subjects don't understand and to which they can't therefore have given their informed consent (assuming they are aware of any processing and have given any consent at all).
2. Governments and organisations with ties to governments are still hoovering up huge amounts of personal data allegedly for purposes involving security with little meaningful oversight and little need to demonstrate effectiveness or proportionality.
Until statements like these are false, data protection and privacy law isn't really protecting people from the biggest threats anyway, and the main positive effect of the GDPR is just to give the regulators the ability to impose fines for things that were mostly prohibited anyway but now on a scale that is significant to large businesses. That in itself is probably no bad thing, but if that's all it achieves then it's far from clear that it's been worth the huge implementation costs and the uncertainty it has brought even to honest organisations.
I’m surprised no one’s mentioned pandoc by now. It’s a Swiss army knife that among other things makes slides from Markdown documents and lets you pick from a number of JS templates or Latex/Beamer. Converting Markdown to PDF slides is just a simple-ish oneliner away.
And terrific for a whole number of other use cases, too - including but not limited to Markdown <-> Word, Epub conversion, HTML conversion and endless others. I find myself turning to it all the time.
Used pandoc for a couple presentations recently and while it's clear the experience will be wonderful eventually, it's still a bit buggy. There is no widescreen template included with Pandoc and attempts to use other templates caused me to encounter https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues/5402 . The resulting .pptx files won't open in Keynote, either, but luckily they did open in Google Slides, which then let me download a visually-identical .pptx that opens everywhere. Point is, slide support in Pandoc is still somewhat new and people should not go in expecting a trouble-free experience at this point.
I love pandoc, and I would love it even more if it had full support for LaTeX math. Unfortunately, the math support is very primitive (meaning, I cannot copy-paste maths from my LaTeX paper and expect it to work and look correct once converted to html, even with the mathjax option). I spend a weekend trying to hack the haskell code to correct a few problems, but it got to nothing.
I use pandoc to output revealjs presentations when I want to present web things (with links, videos or gifs). And it is good as I have some teaching content that I use in webpages, in presentation and for print.
Presentation notes kind of work, but I don't like them (in general, not just for revealjs)?
Web logs are not a punishable offence under the GDPR, if you have a legal basis for retaining those logs and reasonable retention and data minimisation policies. If those are in place and you've documented them, you have nothing to worry about.
Why? You have a legitimate interest (one of the six legal bases under the GDPR) to combat fraud and maintain information security. That's the primary reason you have those IPs in your logs in the first place.
If you're using those logs for analytics purposes, things get slightly murkier, but if you're just using IP addresses to enrich your log data with GeoIP, you should be fine. You might even be able to get away with more granular third-party databases, but the more detailed you get, the closer you get to profiling (which is not where you want to be, if you want to minimise your legal fees).
More to the point, I don't understand all this talk about web logs being illegal. If people have collected and processed personal data without thinking about the whys and wherefores, isn't it just a good thing this makes one think about what one is logging and what it's used for? Granted, IP addresses are far from sensitive (depending on your threat model), but I've seen things in technical logs that make me happy about reliable automated retention policies. Also, granted, it's a hassle - that's the price you pay for privacy.
I'd still be glad if nginx et al shipped with more GDPR-compatible defaults.
> If people have collected and processed personal data without thinking about the whys and wherefores, isn't it just a good thing this makes one think about what one is logging and what it's used for
If people are creating software that burns fossil fuels without thinking about the whys wouldn't it be a good thing to have a law that regulates how we use electricity? Shouldn't an EU regulator have input on whether you can release your new blockchain app? You should be fine if its purpose falls into one of the covered categories...
People are creating online communities that enable abuse of members. Do we need statues and regulations to mandate abuse protections in online interactions and punish platforms that allow users to abuse other users?
> If people are creating software that burns fossil fuels
They aren't. Only hardware burns fossil fuels, and computing hardware doesn't inherently do so, for the most part, only if you choose to hook it up to a fossil fuel power plant rather than something else; the software isn't the thing directly to address.
OTOH, the personal data use you are drawing a poor analogy to is the direct point of concern.
I don't want to torture this metaphor any further, but you're kinda proving my point that software developers do not consider the energy and environmental impact of their work. Software that uses significant CPU time uses more electricity and is worse for the environment.
Misuse of personal data is a problem. Wasting electricity is a problem. Online harassment is a problem.
If wasting electricity becomes such a big problem for the society as misuse of personal data already is, sure, let's introduce regulations on that, too.
In some European countries, there are regulations already on how to insulate new buildings to avoid energy waste.
> If wasting electricity becomes such a big problem for the society as misuse of personal data already is, sure, let's introduce regulations on that, too.
Sure, what could go wrong there? Regulator, "We're going to need to look closer at that for-loop to see if it complies. And you do realize that n+1 queries are a violation of EU law?"
Your example is obviously unrealistic, but even when buying it, it rather supports my position. Imagine a regulator indeed pointing out where you can optimize your algorithms and thus save energy, money and achieve faster query processing. What is the problem with that?
Fire safety regulator: "we're going to need to look closer at that door seal glue component to see if it complies...". Nobody complains here about a regulator looking into details.
Microsoft actually lets you download install media for Windows 7 and Windows 8 these days. You just need the license key. I haven't tried that for OEM, though.
Having an hour less in the work week should be balanced against being productive for longer.