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The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was supposed to be the first, real legislation that users could count on to help safeguard their data against the predatory practices of companies like Facebook and prevent another Cambridge Analytica debacle. Unfortunately, while the idea sounds good on paper, it turns out that even GDPR can’t protect users from the insidious nature of Facebook and others like it.
As The Wall Street Journal points out, the GDPR is likely to actually help Facebook and Google in their data collection practices than hurt them. This is because of how they are the only companies that actually have the funds to comply with the law, while those at the bottom and are just starting out are the ones that will get stamped to oblivion.
This is what EU Justice Commissioner Vera Jourova realized too late when she met with tech companies in California last fall. Instead of the stretched nerves and high anxiety levels that she expected from Facebook or Google due to the demands of the then-upcoming privacy laws, what she found were tech giants entirely at ease.
“They were more relaxed, and I became more nervous,” Jourova said about the meetings. “They have the money, an army of lawyers, an army of technicians, and so on.”
What’s more, the wording of the GDPR isn’t specific or strong enough to actually pose a threat to either Facebook or Google. These companies might be making a big show of supposedly complying with the law, Futurism notes, but it doesn’t really make a difference.
The law simply forces tech companies to specifically state what data they will be collecting from users and what they will be using that data for. There’s nothing in the law that indicates how they should do this. As such, Facebook could simply put these disclosures in the standard User Agreement format, buried under a mountain of technical jargon and no one would be the wiser.
Who even reads those things, anyway? At this point, the GDPR is basically toothless.
