You Can Run But You Cannot Hide
When it comes to things related to the Internet, European governments and bureaucrats live in a dream world of their own, totally disconnected from reality, the power of technology and the ingenuity of algorithms. The latest instance is the European Parliament’s attempt at data protection on the Net. The easy (and naïve) approach to data protection would be to ban almost any form of data sharing. But the EU is not that dumb. They know that data sets can be mined for useful patterns in lots of fields, like in healthcare. But here is where the EU is divorced from reality: they believe there are such things as anonymous data and “pseudonymised” data (date where true identifiers have been replaced with pseudonyms). Based on that misconception, they exempted the first category from regulation and subjected the second to milder regulation. But as Seth David Schoen said: “Just because something seems anonymous at first glance, doesn't mean it really is – both because of the ...