Can you remember what the world was like before Instagram and Facebook? Well, you might experience it soon, at least if you live in Europe. Due to General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Meta might not get permission to transfer, store and process data from its European users on US-based servers. If the solution is not found, the people in Europe might say bye-bye to Facebook and Instagram.
Court orders grandma to delete her grandchildren’s photos from Facebook
No this is not a satirical article – this really happened. A grandma from the Netherlands posted photos of her grandchildren to Facebook and Pinterest without their parents’ permission. After a fallout with her daughter about it, the whole thing ended up in court. The judge ruled that the matter falls under EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), so they ordered the grandmother to take the photos down.
Don’t want to be in this festival’s photographs? Then put a red dot on your head
The whole issue of privacy in a public place seems to keep coming up. People want their privacy, I get that. But they want it in public places, where everybody else can see. While privacy advocates might object to cameras being pointed anywhere near their general direction, they seem to forget they are seen by potentially hundreds of CCTV cameras a day.
One festival company, Haarlem Culinair, thinks they’ve found a solution, though. They’ve come up with a pretty ingenious opt-out scheme for festival-goers. Stick a great big red dot on your forehead.
The GDPR – how bad is it for photographers?
The EU has a new data protection law, the so-called GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation, or as we Germans like to call it: “Datenschutzgrundverordnung” (Gesundheit!). The rules took effect on May 25th and so far it’s pretty chaotic: in the EU we cannot reach some newspapers in the outside world because they cannot comply with the new rules.
A guy in Austria is using the law to file $8.8 billion dollar lawsuits against Facebook and Google. Hundreds of bloggers have taken down their sites, fearful of the possibility of serious fines. Internet light bulbs have stopped working properly. And photographers are being targeted, too.
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