Or I might watch the telly.

We haven't had any training on it in work yet we have all the options to log it. Its gonna be complete fucking havoc.

The CA controversy was about election overspending, not swaying the vote. At least in relation to the Leave campaign.

tigerswiftly wrote:

They’re a very small company so either compliant or blissfully unaware

I have a feeling that GDPR is much stricter on medium-large businesses than small ones, but I could be wrong.

It treats everyone the same, doesn't it? And therein lies the problem - a small Primary school is not in the same league as fucking Google!

Yep.  That’s pretty much our problem.  Small business, but holding huge reams of personal information, in a variety of formats, shared with a variety of organisations for (in our case) 11000 individuals, with no consideration given for how the Hell most of this legislation is even supposed to apply, no clear answers to a bunch of fundamental questions, and an expectation that we employ a DPO despite no funding, and few people with the requisite knowledge and experience.  It's incredibly annoying.

As the Data Privacy Manager at our gaff, my fucking life has been GDPR lately. Given presentations all day today, same again tomorrow

SpaceGazelle wrote:

Computers are advancing too fast. Everyone is just scrabbling around holding onto coattails. It's a very strange situation.

Yep.

https://aeon.co/essays/is-technology-making-the-world-indecipherable

Yossarian wrote:

https://aeon.co/essays/is-technology-making-the-world-indecipherable

It really is. My masters degree thing is really quite cutting edge (in that you learn "new" trendy stuff without understanding anything about the layer underneath), so it's almost entirely focused on machine learning and big data. It's quite exciting and genuinely interesting but it's also a bit creepy. 

I don't know anybody on my course who isn't concerned about some area or another, and sometimes over lunch somebody will mention something about this or that and everyone will go a bit quiet. It's hard to explain, and it's not that anyone doesn't want to do the course, but it's sometimes sobering thinking how things might become. My personal terror is genetic programming, and by that I mean software coding itself. It literally throws random nonsense together until it starts to work, and unlike normal evolutionary cycles it can go through several billion generations of evolution in minutes. 

90% of all market trading is now done using such algorithms and nobody, and I mean nobody, understands what those algorithms are because they are changing and evolving in real-time. It's random mutation and survival of the fittest done in microseconds and it never stops. Nobody could possibly understand the code but it's the results that matter, and it gets those. It's becoming increasingly ubiquitous too. 

The analogy with evolution is not some technical wordplay, it's exactly the same. It has randomness, fitness, mutation and crossover. It starts from garbage and evolves into something wonderful and powerful. There's nothing in this Universe as wonderful and horrible as evolution once it produced animals. I wonder what this will produce?

I've posted this before but it's a great (and benign!) example of evolutionary computing. Leave it long enough and it usually produces something amazing.

http://boxcar2d.com/

SpaceGazelle wrote:

... It literally throws random nonsense together until it starts to work, ...

Basically normal programming then. But faster. And with no copy and paste from stackoverflow.

I'm using Street View right now, so probably not.

Yossarian wrote:

I can’t see how it would be. Maybe if all of Google Maps was gone, but I can’t see any personally identifiable info that could be gleaned from Street View that couldn’t be gained from Maps.

Faces, licence plates, signs with telephone numbers etc? I know they're supposed to be blurred out but they aren't always. Anyway, I have no idea, but street view isn't working for me at all at the moment.

Yeah, but I get that little picture that it shows when there's no street view data available for a location.

Yossarian wrote:

The CA controversy was about election overspending, not swaying the vote. At least in relation to the Leave campaign.

Sorry to backtrack, but isn’t election overspending all about swaying votes?

No, the magical big data psy-ops are just standard modern marketing techniques. The controversy (I think) is all about loopholes in the law allowing propaganda to be distributed unchecked. As with GDPR issues, it’s really about the law not having kept up with technology.

I’m still amused by our article stating that GDPR emails are unnecessary and possibly illegal that we published about a week after our third round of emailing ~1.5m people asking if they still wanted to receive our emails.