《经济学人》精读89:The EU guarantees its citizens’ data rights,in theory

Europeans asking Facebook for their data run into a maze of obstacles

Apr 5th 2018

IN THE wake of the scandal over the unauthorised use of Facebook data by Cambridge Analytica, a campaign consultant, some Americans are looking enviously at the European Union, whose privacy laws are the global gold standard. Rights over personal data are enshrined in the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights. European citizens have the right to have their data processed fairly, to know what data an organisation holds about them and what it is doing with those data. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a law strengthening data protection across the EU, goes into force at the end of May (see article). Yet in practice, when European citizens try to exercise such rights, they tend to end up mired in bureaucracy.

Take the case of Paul-Olivier Dehaye. In December 2016 Mr Dehaye, a Belgian mathematician, e-mailed Facebook asking for a copy of the data it had gathered about him through an advertising tool called Pixel. Organisations based in the EU or which process data of EU residents are required to answer questions like this, known as subject-access requests. Yet it took 106 days for Facebook to do so.The firm acknowledged the existence of Mr Dehaye’s Pixel data, but declined to provide them, stating that doing so would involve “disproportionate effort”.The data were buried too deep inside Facebook’s data-analytics warehouse, known as Hive. When Mr Dehaye appealed to the Irish Data Protection Commissioner(DPC), which regulates Facebook’s data processing in Europe, he entered a similar maze of e-mails. The DPC is still assessing the case.

enshrine: to remember and protect (someone or something that is valuable, admired, etc) 

欧洲对私人信息的保护条例是黄金准则，让很多美国人乃至世界各地的人羡慕。但尽管法律法规完善，现实中实施起来，个人就被这些官僚体制带入了迷宫中...

Antonio García Martínez, a former Facebook product manager, says that sending Mr Dehaye his Pixel data would be technically difficult. Facebook’s global corporate structure makes it even harder. Employees of Facebook Ireland, he says, have “no power or leverage to tell an engineer at Menlo Park” to do anything, including retrieving Mr Dehaye’s data.

Other Europeans run into similar quagmires with American tech companies. Millie Graham Wood, a solicitor with Privacy International, a charity, has tried for six months to find out what data Google has collected from her Nest smart thermostat. The firm has sent her only links to privacy policies, blog posts and irrelevant log data, each time after a long delay. “It’s been a real nightmare,” says Ms Wood.“If you’re not a lawyer, you’re going to give up.” She has appealed to Britain’s data-protection regulator.

quagmire:  1. an area of soft, wet ground;  2. a situation that is hard to deal with or get out of: a situation that is full of problems

Facebook说找到那个人的数据在技术上来说是个难题，再加上他们的全球组织架构更让提取数据难上加难... 其他的案例也是一样，再不断地绕啊绕，就是避开了重点，不给您看到底抓取了哪些数据！

The tech companies prefer to meet their obligations through web portals which let people download some, but not necessarily all, of their data. That may not be enough, especially if the portal includes data that users have uploaded themselves, but not the way the system categorises them. The GDPR makes few changes to subject-access rights, other than removing a small fee which data controllers had been able to charge. This is likely to lead to more requests. Refusal to provide the requested data has never been tested in court. As Europeans fret ever more about what data moguls know about them, that is likely to change.

mogul: a powerful and important person: TV moguls, advertising mogul, a young Hollywood mogul

总结： 欧洲对于个人信息隐私看地真的很重，相比中国人对于信息隐私真的就像百度李彦宏说的那样没那么在乎么？也可能是没得选而已

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Lexile®Measure: 1200L - 1300L

Mean Sentence Length: 17.96

Mean Log Word Frequency: 3.16

Word Count: 503

这篇文章的蓝思值是在1200-1300L， 是经济学人里中等难度的文章~

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