Is the GDPR rubbish?
Posted: Tue Feb 04, 2025 5:07 am
As a web agency and service provider, we have been dealing with the EU's new data protection regulations ("GDPR") for several months, and the Swiss media have discovered the topic for a few weeks now. The regulations will be law from May 25, 2018. If you think that I am sharply criticizing the GDPR in this column, you are mistaken: Yes, of course, it is a behemoth, it is formulated too complicatedly, and it could have been made simpler. But data protection is not an end in itself for uk rcs data an authority - as one might have thought with the Eurobanana or the legendary cucumber regulation - but rather the right to view, change and delete the personal data of every citizen. And for once, that does not (only) affect the lives of others.
The problem is not the GDPR, as some critics loudly rant, but the companies that misuse our data, health insurance companies that - as various media reported in early May - track us everywhere we go online. At the same time, we have to take responsibility for ourselves: we are constantly giving Facebook, Google & Co. gigantic amounts of data about our locations, favorite restaurants and political insights. The idea that these services are free is a "misleading label." But where it is convenient for us, data protection falls by the wayside. Sometimes we have to be protected from ourselves, and many companies need to be kept on a short leash when it comes to data protection.
No - to answer the initial question - the GDPR is not rubbish. Just because something could have been done better does not mean it is fundamentally wrong. It is good and right that this discussion is being conducted widely and that companies are being given a data corset. My data belongs to me. Period.
The problem is not the GDPR, as some critics loudly rant, but the companies that misuse our data, health insurance companies that - as various media reported in early May - track us everywhere we go online. At the same time, we have to take responsibility for ourselves: we are constantly giving Facebook, Google & Co. gigantic amounts of data about our locations, favorite restaurants and political insights. The idea that these services are free is a "misleading label." But where it is convenient for us, data protection falls by the wayside. Sometimes we have to be protected from ourselves, and many companies need to be kept on a short leash when it comes to data protection.
No - to answer the initial question - the GDPR is not rubbish. Just because something could have been done better does not mean it is fundamentally wrong. It is good and right that this discussion is being conducted widely and that companies are being given a data corset. My data belongs to me. Period.