Privacy Lessons From Europe
from the learn-from-their-mistakes dept
An opinion piece over at News.com talks about all the complaints various organizations in Europe have over the EU's data protection directive. I personally don't know much about this issue, but the complaints seem to be that in an effort to protect individual's privacy through government regulations there have been a number of unintended consequences - that have actually made things worse. The storage requirements are burdensome and the law is being misused to hold back information that should be made public. The writer suggests that the American "self-regulated" model is working much better in protecting people's privacy. I'm not convinced that we're doing such a great job in protecting anyone's privacy, but it sounds like a European style solution isn't ideal either.
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Rubbish!
The companies are complaining that these rules are a pain. Well, the antipollution laws were a pain too. You have to design your processes to deal; they're always harder to retrofit then to design properly up front.
Some externalities cannot be captured through standard pricing mechanisms. Pollution is known to be one. Privacy is another.
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