latk

Author here. Yep, that's close to my thinking. I don't actually believe that Cursor (or similar tools) are completely shit.

But I worry that the Cursor team perhaps doesn't care whether their product actually delivers value. That they just want to sell the appearance of productivity.

This, to me, is a much bigger concern than everyday performance of their tool. Tools can be improved, organizational culture usually not.

But this is wild speculation. I didn't want to write this as the conclusion of the actual article, which tried to be more factual and to take their marketing at face value.

Offering a service to European consumers?

Probably not a big issue. GDPR compliance can be challenging without a suitable mindset, but it's not impossible.

* Consider that the GDPR has an extremely broad concept of “personal data” – it's not just identifying info but anything that can be reasonably linked to a person!

* Data minimization – only collecting what is needed, and only using it as actually needed – is already a great step.

* Writing a GDPR-compliant privacy notice can be a good exercise to understand what data you're processing for which purposes. Art 12–15 GDPR are the closest it gets to a checklist.

* And you'll have to implement “appropriate” security measures, but what is appropriate is largely up to you.

The more challenging part is ensuring that you're only using data processors/vendors that are contractually bound to use the data as you instruct, and that you protect “international transfers” where the recipient (e.g. vendor) is outside Europe. If you're looking for server locations in North America, I recommend looking at Canada since they have an “adequacy decision” from Europe.

You will have to be GDPR-compliant if you “offer” your service to people who are in Europe, i.e. actively market to such people, or have testimonials from EU customers, offer French localization, accept payment in EUR, and so on. Mere availability of your service is not an offer.

Offering a B2B SaaS service to companies that need to be GDPR-compliant?

You're fucked. There is no legally safe way for a company to use an US-based data processor, i.e. to engage you as a vendor. However, and this is your “get out of jail” card, many customers don't care, and will be happy as long as they can sign “SCCs”.

Identifiability for IP addresses uses an even lower standard. The GDPR says that for something to be truly anonymous, there must not be any “reasonably likely” means for identification, even with the help of third parties, even when relying on additional information. There has of course been litigation about this, in the form of the Breyer v Bundesrepublik Deutschland case. It was based on the GDPR's predecessor law, but it used virtually identical phrasing so the conclusion still holds.

The European Court of Justice constructed a hypothetical scenario to show that identification can reasonably be likely. Let's say the website was attacked by a hacker. In a logfile, you find the attacker's IP address and want to prosecute them. So you report the incident to whatever authority is responsible for such incidents, which then gets a court order so that the attacker's ISP discloses information about the IP address. As long as the ISP knows to whom that IP was allocated at the time, there is now a reasonably likely chain of events that leads to identification of the person behind the IP address.

In this case about Google Fonts, the court says that it's sufficient if the website operator or Google have the “abstract means” for identification, not whether they actually did this for this plaintiff's specific IP address.

A solution would be if the EU forbids ISPs from keeping such logs, but given repeated attempts at mass data retention laws for national security purposes and pressure from the IP industry^W^W film and music industry for copyright infringement prosecution purposes, that doesn't seem likely.

> Do you, as the website operator, have the right to copy and serve these fonts to your visitors?

All the fonts on Google Fonts are open source. When GDPR came into force in 2018 I downloaded all the fonts I needed, checked their licenses, and uploaded them on my servers along with necessary notices as required by the licenses.

The matter could also be sidestepped if the CDN were to offer a GDPR data processing agreement (DPA) and would make guarantees about the locations of servers. The free public CDNs understandably don't do this, and it seems Google Fonts is not covered by the Google Cloud DPA.

The court judgement addresses this exact point. There are previous judgements (Breyer v Bundesrepublik Deutschland) that establish that dynamic IP addresses are personal data. There are reasonable means to identify the data subject with the help of third parties, such as the ISP. “For this it is sufficient that the defendant has the abstract means for identification of the person behind the IP address. Whether the defendant or Google have the concrete means for linking the IP address with the plaintiff is irrelevant.”

That there is correlating information like timestamps, useragent strings, or referer headers increases the likelihood of actual identification, but the mere reasonable possibility of identification is sufficient for IP addresses to be personal data.

> The fact is that CDNs and similar third party services play an important role.

They no longer do, since browsers implemented cache isolation.

> if I "host" my fonts in S3 do I have to get consent for sharing IP with Amazon?

No, you're supposed to contractually bind your vendors/service providers as data processors with a contract (“data processing agreement”) per Art 28 GDPR. There's some debate around whether US-based companies are legally able of entering into such an agreement (say hello to the Cloud Act from me), but the general consensus still is that non-US cloud regions might be OK, and that CDNs that let you sign a DPA (like Akamai, Cloudflare, Fastly, …) are also OK. In contrast, Google Fonts does not seem to be covered by the Google Cloud DPA.

> with every router that goes through tracert?

No, such mere transmission doesn't count as processing, and/or the intermediaries are responsible for their own compliance. In any case the connection should be protected by TLS so that only the client IP address + your domain name is visible to intermediate routers.

> websites will add more crap "opt in" CYA forms

Unfortunately, I agree, though the point of this judgement is that self-hosting some assets is a perfectly cromulent alternative. I think relying on “consent” would be difficult in a case like this, since it is not generally possible to make access to a service conditional on consent to unnecessary processing activities. Using a CDN for assets like files is unnecessary.

> I just wish that websites wouldn't force us outside of the EU to the asinine UX required by the EU

For EU-based websites there is no choice, as the law doesn't care about where the users are.

There's also a bit of irony in here that there has been a lot of work in replacing the cursed cookie consent requirements that gave us most of these annoying consent banners – but the past few months revealed that the US tech giants have been successfully lobbying against the proposed ePrivacy Regulation. So please redirect your ire against Google. Without them this might have been fixed in 2018.

This argument was tried in the Fashion ID case. A company had inserted Facebook Like buttons on the web page, and argued that it was not responsible for the ensuing disclosure of personal data (such as IP addresses or possible tracking cookies) to Facebook. See, it was the browser and not the website operator that disclosed the data, and the website operator never had access to the data in the browser in the first place!

The European Court of Justice did not buy this argument. By coding the website in a particular way, the website operator was responsible for causing the user's browser to act in a particular way, so it was the “data controller” for the collection an transmission of personal data by the Facebook Like button, though Facebook is of course jointly responsible for what their code does.

The underlying argument is that someone is a data controller and thus responsible for GDPR compliance when they determine the “purposes and means” of processing, alone or jointly with others. Embedding the code for the button was an exercise of this power to determine purposes and means. In contrast, the website operator is not a data controller for whatever Facebook does with the collected data on its servers, because it cannot control what FB does.

The given case from Munich is a very straightforward extension from the Fashion ID judgement, though the website operator didn't even claim that they weren't responsible. Instead, they argued that they had a “legitimate interest”in loading fonts from Google servers, which the court rejected. While I consider it probable that Google does not use data from Fonts servers for tracking, the judgement correctly points out that Google is well-known for tracking – but this doesn't matter anyway, since already the disclosure of personal data without a legal basis is a problem.

Careful. That is an 100% unofficial site. It is not chartered or funded by the EU. The linked article is from “Richie Koch”an editor working on human rights stories who wrote the article on behalf of Proton VPN, which runs the GDPR.eu site as a content marketing scheme. The linked article is not the law and not official guidance, though it provides a reasonably good summary.

Everything sqrt2 says in the comments is entirely correct, as far as I can tell.

JSON lets you write numbers. They can have a sign, decimal part, and an exponent. The standard euphemistically describes this as:

> JSON is agnostic about the semantics of numbers. […] JSON instead offers only the representation of numbers that humans use: a sequence of digits. […] That is enough to allow interchange.

But can you encode/decode an arbitrary integer or a float? Probably not!

* Float values like Infinity or NaN cannot be represented.

* JSON doesn't have separate representation for ints and floats. If an implementation decodes an integer value as a float, this might lose precision.

* JSON doesn't impose any size limits. A JSON number could validly describe a 1000-bit integer, but no reasonable implementation would be able to decode this.

The result is that sane programs – that don't want to be at the mercy of whatever JSON implementation processes the document – might encode large integers as strings. In particular, integers beyond JavaScript's Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER (2^53 - 1) should be considered unsafe in a JSON document.

Another result is that no real-world JSON representation can round-trip “correctly”: instead of treating numbers as “a sequence of digits” they might convert them to a float64, in which case a JSON → data model → JSON roundtrip might result in a different document. I would consider that to be a problem due to underspecification.

If a study is observing how human reacts to a certain situation, that's research with human subjects. The Linux study observed how maintainers react to bugs, this CCPA/GDPR request spam observed how data protection staff reacts to requests about their processes.

And the backlash is not hypocritical. You're of course right that FB has also done really questionable research, but that doesn't matter here. I've also seen significant uncertainty about this spam series in the data protection/privacy community, i.e. criticism by those people who get to deal with these emails.

There is like 15 years of official guidance and case law on ePrivacy, with relevant guidance from the Art 29 Working Party (precursor to the current EDPB) published around 2014. But I don't think regulators are in a hurry to get into arguments about the finer points when the ePrivacy Regulation could be passed any year now, which would allow a more nuanced approach to cookies (e.g. allowing legitimate interest instead of consent).

TTDSG is finally a correct implementation of the 2005 ePrivacy directive. § 25 TTDSG literally just rephrases the exact ePrivacy requirements. The pendant to the above quote is § 25 Abs 2 Nr 1:

> Die Einwilligung nach Absatz 1 ist nicht erforderlich, wenn der alleinige Zweck [der Speicherung oder des Zugriffs] die Durchführung der Übertragung einer Nachricht über ein öffentliches Telekommunikationsnetz ist oder wenn [sie] unbedingt erforderlich ist, damit der Anbieter eines Telemediendienstes einen vom Nutzer ausdrücklich gewünschten Telemediendienst zur Verfügung stellen kann.

It's a legal term the EU came up with to cover things like websites and apps in a technology-agnostic manner.