Author: ADAM SATARIANO / Source: New York Times
Each week, Kevin Roose, technology columnist at The New York Times, discusses developments in the tech industry, offering analysis and maybe a joke or two. Kevin is away this week, so Adam Satariano, The Times’s European tech correspondent, is stepping in. Want this newsletter in your inbox? Sign up here.
Hello! All your regular newsletter authors are writing books, taking a week off, or taking a week off when they should be writing books. Instead, you’ve got me, the newest member of The New York Times tech crew, covering the European tech world based in London.
In what seems like an acceptable form of new-hire hazing, I’ve been asked to share some of this week’s tech news from a perspective 5,000-plus miles from Silicon Valley. Let’s get to it.
The Four-Letter Privacy Law
Instagram is threatening to block me and many others in Europe out of its app if I don’t acknowledge new privacy settings. I had a similar dance with Facebook and Twitter recently. The notices are a result of a European data-privacy law called the General Data Protection Regulation, known as G.D.P.R., going into effect on May 25.
I won’t bore you with details. With 11 chapters and 99 subsections, the law’s text is a good homeopathic cure for insomnia; it even has many well-paid lawyers confused about how it will be enforced.
I’m not convinced that the regulations will do much to change the current tech hierarchy, or that bombarding people with consent requests will change behavior, but I’m eager to see how new transparency rules play out.
The law gives European residents stronger rights to see the information a company collects about them — such as banks, health clubs, retailers or other organizations with personal data — and to ask that it be deleted.The disclosures will provide an inside look at the dossiers companies…
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