Harmful Standards and Rules
I am not a fan of establishments enforcing standards to regulate how people do things. This is how a standard is made up.
So if a standard offers a benefit for my case, I would happily use that without someone enforcing on me. Unfortunately some authorities thinks they are smarter than others and try to push some rules everyone hates without doing a simple cost-benefit analysis.
Cost-Benefit Analysis
A cost-benefit analysis is a process that businesses use to analyze which decisions to make and which to forgo. The cost-benefit analyst sums the potential rewards expected from an action and then subtracts the total costs associated with taking that action.
GDPR for What?
I am furious everytime I see a GDPR dialog popping from a website I visit and I am amazed by the stupidity of the people who comes up with those rules.
I refuse to use this kind of time wasting nonsense on my websites but there can be significant fines for that. Does anyone ever read that? Do you think the website is unable to get any information from you if you click decline? Building a web application is already a tedious work with lots of things to consider. Thanks to some authorities now we have to add this popup which everyone loves.
License Agreement Dialogs
This is not an enforcement but a very common one. Why do some people push these stupid dialogs even if they know nobody reads them? Did you ever print and read a software user license agreement? I wanted to raise consciousness about this because things need to change.
Imagine you are installing a software on windows, you are shown a license agreement. As always you did not read that long text and you click accept. But this time something was diffrent. The license agreement stated that, end-user should wire transfer 1000$ to the developers IBAN everytime he uses the program. After a month they call you and demand the money. Would you be obligated to pay? Of course not. Ask your lawyer. The license agreements on setup wizards and sofware has no actual real wold use.
Personal Information Laws - The new bullshit trend
Building a website with a membership now comes with a lot of legal hustle and a lot of responsibility of security of data you store. There are serious legal consequences if you store or share personal information or you store some data like credit cards without obeying some security standards.
Is it Really for the Safety of your Personal Information?
You are asked to store no private information without your visitors consent but as a webmaster you should sneakily record all visitor IP addresses and visits to give goverments if they request them from you.
While you are being a resposible citizen and obeying these rules, your goverment forces your ISP s to record all your socket connections. All hosting companies / datacenters are obligated to store logs for goverments to resolve your identity in case of necessity for years.
So this is not a war for the security of your personal information. Some establishments wants to have monopoly over everyones personal Information so they can store and query anything about you without your consent but they give you a headache when you want to store information for your own visitors.
Data Protection Laws are the Real Danger
I am a CyberSecurity Expert and I think Leaking of personal information is not the real danger and I mean it. Most people happily give their personal information on facebook it is not a big deal for them.
The problem with personal information is; for example when malicious person links someones personal profile to another leaked data on an adult dating site, he can discover a person is gay. And I admit there are lots of ways to use data for malicious purposes. But the real problem is not personal information leak here. The real problem is that person is too computer illeterate to use the same email on both sites hoping to stay anonymous. And he is gay.
Personal Information laws are punishing the tech people for the stupidity of other computer illiterate people for using the technology in a dumb way.
Nobody wants their sites or customer database to get hacked. There is no point putting additional pressure with laws to website and company owners. Even the largest companies like Twitter, Facebook, Adobe, Thumblr leaked a lot of customer private information in the last years. This should have been your clue. Even if these companies with most brilliant employees and milions to spend on security gets hacked why make it a big deal for smaller organizations?
Admin CyberSecurity