lambertsimnel

This is my understanding, too. Sorry if that wasn't clear in my earlier comment.

However, I also believe that unenforceable parts of a contract have no effect, except in the minds of the parties to that contract. My suspicion is that contracts are sometimes drafted with this in mind.

You can withdraw consent later, but I don't see how that would affect data processed before the withdrawal (except that storage is processing and the data would have to be deleted). I don't imagine a reputable employer would have any other use for the data, so the withdrawal of your consent might not bother them much. If your application were successful and you took the job, I expect that would establish contract, rather than consent, as a legal basis for them to process your data.

In general, I'm not sure a company processing my data on the basis of consent would stop all processing of my data just because I withdraw my consent. Some processing of some of my data might have a different legal basis. Judging by some websites' privacy options, there's a distinction between consent (opt-in), legitimate interest (opt-out) and other legal bases (maybe neither). I'm confused about website forms that have separate reject and object options for each category of data processing and a reject-all button that closes the form. Does clicking "reject all" mean I have or haven't objected?

But if laws can override contracts (which presumably they can), then contracts can appear to establish permissions/restrictions that are illegal. At least one contract I've signed includes something about the rest being enforceable if any part of it isn't enforceable. Perhaps that helps to contain actual mistakes, but I assume employers use it to persuade employees that they're bound by illegal non-compete clauses, for example.

> But electronic 'equivalents' of neural nets is one area where analog might make sense.

That's an interesting idea, but could the weights be transferred to different hardware and still work? If not, that would be a significant limitation, even if it were preferable in some cases.

It could have been that so much future growth was priced in that a reduction in the growth rate could have justified a reduction in the share price