this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
2448 points (99.2% liked)

Technology

58303 readers
14 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

It had been in the works for a while, but now it has formally been adopted. From the article:

The regulation provides that by 2027 portable batteries incorporated into appliances should be removable and replaceable by the end-user, leaving sufficient time for operators to adapt the design of their products to this requirement.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 236 points 1 year ago (37 children)

GDPR

forcing usb-c

forcing removable batteries

The EU sure is handling tech laws and tech giants a fuck of a lot better than the US is. Damn.

Jealous.

[–] [email protected] 56 points 1 year ago

Well yeah, the US is set up for giant corporations to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible regardless of how much it will fuck over the customer, bonus points if fucking over the customer doesn’t include immediate proof of physical harm to said customer.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

Wait until you hear about another awesome thing they're trying to do: chat control

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The real danger behind Chat Control and similar measures, is that countries won't even have to utilize parallel construction anymore. No longer will dragnet surveillance mostly target the big guys. They'll be able to basically automate prosecution of any crime that they desire.

Think about how many little slices have been taken out of our freedom pie over the last 10 years. How many similar dystopian laws have passed despite our outrage?

Technology is outpacing our ability to protect ourselves, and countries will keep pushing boundaries until nothing is left sacred.

Oppression never sleeps.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Technology is just a tool though. It could equally be used to stop tax evasion entirely, and all sorts of crime by tracking transactions and abolishing cash. Location monitoring for evidence, etc.

Like surveillance isn't a bad thing when your house is burgled or you get mugged.

The real issue is that the politicians are often the ones doing the tax evasion, fraud, etc. in the first place, and they don't care about violent crime that only affects working class areas.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Did you really just try to spin transactional and location tracking as a good thing?

How is it that some of the safest countries are also the most privacy respecting?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Yay! Very awesome indeed. /s

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

That's disgusting.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah, that is so unfortunate. As someone who really wants to move to Europe someday mainly because of their excellent regulations regarding tech, Chat Control has certainly made me rethink that decision, though not really cancelling it outright.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not hard when you start saying "corporations are people too" and then let them donate all the money to the people making the laws.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

The concept of corporate personhood is way older than you think, it goes back to at least ancienct Rome around 800 BC. Other countries have that as well, eg. the German constitution says very explicitly "Fundamental rights shall also apply to domestic artificial persons insofar as the nature of such rights shall permit.". That's not really the issue, the actual issue is the extreme reliance of political campaigns on donations coupled with the exorbitant costs of political campaigning in the US.

Citizen's United is very often misrepresented as being about corporate personhood, when in fact this concept isn't even referenced in the ruling at all. Instead the ruling says that political speech rights aren't contingent on the identity of the speaker at all. Even if you abolish corporate personhood (which would bring a whole host of other issues with it because for example corporate property ownership hinges on the legal person concept as well) that still wouldn't overturn Citizen's United.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (3 children)

We should have that in America

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

The good news is that GDPR protects you somewhat regardless of where you're from and who you are. If a company fucks with the privacy of an EU citizen living in the USA they are still on the hook, so companies generally adopt the measures (e.g. the ability to request and delete all your data) globally. You can even just get a VPN and set it to somewhere in the EU.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

California has a similar law, the CCPA.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I recently learned about this. Funny thing, some parts of it are almost a copy paste of the GDPR.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

But please make it more readable and short please. This document is awful to read

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Legalese is actually a good thing because it covers every possible situation and reduces the number of loopholes. We have people like LegalEagle to break shit down for us into plain English. If we write the laws themselves in plain English then corporate lawyers will argue, successfully, that there's a loophole that lets them violate the spirit of the law, or the government will apply the law in situations where it wasn't meant to be applied in order to fuck over innocent people.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

In France we had something in our constitution once that ruled that trying to abuse the laws was prohibited and judges were instructed to apply the law in a fair way, not in the most technically correct way

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

With a bit of luck, complaince in the EU will become the norm and we will get these globally.

The EU are fighting this fight for everyone.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

it'll just mean that multiple BOMs have to be designed for any given product - it may lead to fewer products being available, over time. or perhaps the reverse - I guess we'll see in ~3.5 years

load more comments (30 replies)