Data-protection laws are great. Shame they’re not being enforced.
This morning’s Observer column:
So we’re faced with a paradox: on the one hand, there’s massive abuse of personal data by a global data-broking industry; on the other, we have a powerful legal instrument that is not being brought to bear on the abusers. How come? Is it because national DPAs are corrupt? Or indolent? Or just plain incompetent? The answer, it seems, is none of the above. They’re simply overwhelmed by the scale of the task – and lamentably under-resourced for it.
Non-enforcement makes a mockery of the rule of law. Was the GDPR really just an aspiration?
Do read the whole thing
The centralisation of power on Zoom
Is the ‘urge to splurge’ a thing of the past?
Nice FT column (possibly behind a paywall, alas) by Pilita Clark.
Last weekend I was lolling on the sofa reading the papers in the afternoon sun when I was struck by an awful thought.
I realised I am so dull that, even though I have spent more than a month in Covid captivity, I miss remarkably little of the life I led before.
It turns out I can live easily without Friday nights in a restaurant or Saturdays in a bar. I always thought I loved going out to the cinema but apparently I am just as happy at home with Netflix. The hundreds of pounds I spend each year on the gym also look increasingly pointless. I can get by with a bike ride involving hills and the odd lope around the block.
It was while I was on one of those lopes, down the local high street, that a more profound realisation dawned. Shop after shuttered shop existed to sell stuff for a rushed, commuting office life that I — and millions like me — may never lead again.
There must be a lot of people thinking like this at the moment.
Self-isolation is not penance
From Dave Winer’s blog:
The frustration [Don] McNeil feels, and I feel, having heard the same story at least four times, the questions assume that all we have to do is penance, stay home for a while, and we will be able to go back to normal, having done our time. This is what Trump seems to think too, and the other Repubs. Maybe some Dems. That’s not it.
Isolating is like plowing a fire line in the middle of a city being inundated by fire. It slows the spread. But you don’t get to resume life, a very altered life, until there are no new cases, until the fire is out. Until you’ve shut down transmission of the disease. This is not a punishment, it’s how we save ourselves.
Yep.