Just feeding into a general discussion about GDPR, Privacy and the #Indieweb, I decided to put a general privacy policy page over on my own website. Comments are welcome. I genuinely think this is a positive moment for us all.

Sebastian, first of all, thank you for your detailed write up on this issue. I think much of your roadmap is worthwhile, and of great interest.

I cannot, however, say that I am convinced by your contentions regarding the effect of GDPR and indieweb sites. In particular, I think your definitions are excessively broad, and you elide much information from both the Regulation itself and the Recitals.

Take, for instance, your quotation of Recital 18, which is key to the matters here presented. I note that you have chosen not to quote the Recital in full (despite its brevity) and you use it in support of (imo) a wholly erroneous contention regarding what is and is not personal. For the record, Recital 18, in full, is as follows (emphasis mine)

This Regulation does not apply to the processing of personal data by a natural person in the course of a purely personal or household activity and thus with no connection to a professional or commercial activity. Personal or household activities could include correspondence and the holding of addresses, or social networking and online activity undertaken within the context of such activities. However, this Regulation applies to controllers or processors which provide the means for processing personal data for such personal or household activities.

It is quite clear, from the highlighted section, that information which is provided in the context of social networking is itself not a subject of the Regulation. I am curious as to why you omitted that second sentence in your article?

I also do not understand your position that German Legal Literature means that any personal website where someone publishes anything regarding an area related to their professional activity automatically becomes a commercial activity for the purpose of GDPR. The GDPR has not, as yet, become law. There is no precedent support for your position in the corpus of the ECJ (nor could there be). There is disputation at all levels of the ECJ on the question of when an activity ceases to be personal activity (Lindqvist, for example, or Rynes) however it is notable that the Working Group regarding GDPR specifically cited the dictum in Lindqvist as incorrect, and both Article 9 and Recitals surrounding same were designed to place restraint on that dictum. The original intention was to broaden the exemption more dramatically, but this was resisted strongly by a curious alliance of authoritarians and anti-governmental fractions in the European Parliament. Nonetheless, the dictum is significantly broader than that which pertained in 1998. (For a more detailed look at this issue, see for example this article by Brendan Van Elsonoy, legal advisor at the Belgian Data Protection Authority.

I would be, naturally, happy to be proven wrong, however I simply cannot accept that your various statements regarding the law of the matter are correct in the absence of evidence to support them. Unfortunately, I don’t speak German, and am unable to comment on Dr. Schwenke’s positions in the podcast. All I can comment on is the statements in your bulleted list.

For example, the first point: “Individuals have to be informed when data about them is pulled in from third sources.”

Informed by whom? By which site? Consent to the viewing, accessing and storage of public data is provided in the Regulation. What is the basis for this claim?

Or the second bullet point: “Pulling “likes” and profile images from Twitter in Indieweb manner (in my opinion precisely described by the show host) requires a statement in the privacy notice and the affected persons have to be informed”

Again - on what basis? Where is the support within the GDPR for this claim?

I’m sorry if this sounds churlish, but as a lawyer I refuse to take such claims as meaningful in the absence of supporting rationale. Like Dr. Schwenke, I’m a practitioner as opposed to an academic of law. Like most such practitioners, I’ve been undertaking GDPR training in the last two years. Not once in any of that training has there been any support for the type of legal minefield you propose. I’ve spoken about Indieweb components, including backfeed, with legal advisors to the Irish, Dutch and Belgian DPAs. None of them have raised objections of the nature mentioned by you as being required by GDPR.

GDPR is scary enough as it is. It is also an incredible opportunity, a moment in which we can look to a future absent the abuse visited upon us all by Corporations with a skewed view of rights and values. I look forward to it for those reasons, and I welcome all efforts to secure that future.

If you happen to follow the feed for my blog, sorry for the spam, I’m helping debug some issues with micropub & indieath in WordPress. 🐛

Micropub update test. This text should be replaced if the test succeeds.

Micropub test of creating a basic h-entry

Micropub test of creating a basic h-entry

Excited to announce that @GoDaddy is our newest sponsor of @IndieWebSummit, and that @sdepolo and @no will be joining us there next month! 🎉 https://2018.indieweb.org
#indiewebsummit #indieweb

Homebrew Website Club Baltimore

#event #HWC #IWC #IndieWeb #HWCBaltimore

Ein IndieWeb Podcast

You're Invited to IndieWeb Summit!

#indieweb #indiewebsummit

What you’re proud of

I wish there was a place where I could read the story of a person. Everybody’s journey is so different and beautiful; each one leads to who we are. It would be the anti-LinkedIn. And because you wouldn’t “engage with brands”, it would be the anti-Facebook, too. Instead, it would be a record of the beauty and diversity of humanity, and a thing to point to when someone asks, “who are you?”

#human #indieweb #sharing #resumés #achievements #personality

Man, CoreData can be a pain! CoreData funkiness is currently the biggest thing holding back me getting the next beta of Indigenous for iOS out. Hopefully I can fix it soon so it doesn’t hold up 1.0 for the IndieWeb Summit 😞

#indieweb #indigenous #tech
@Chronotope I'm curious what your thoughts were on @dsearls ‏article: http://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2018/05/12/gdpr/
Is there a better way for publishers to own their own adtech in a more decentralized #IndieWeb sort of way? What would that look like?

Does GDPR apply to EU citizens in the United States?

going to IndieWeb Summit 2018! June 26-27th at the Elliot Center in Portland, Oregon!
This will be the #indieweb #openweb #dweb event of the year. RSVPs limited to 100 total, sign-up before tickets sell-out: https://2018.indieweb.org/
#indieweb #openweb #dweb

Going to IndieWeb Summit 2018

Going to IndieWeb Summit 2018

Registration (on the microformats wiki) works fine. I just tried it and created a new account. If you are having trouble understanding the microformats wiki, whether with registration or anything, please state the problem as a question and check the FAQ accordingly: http://microformats.org/wiki/faq

Recommend closure of issue #3704, works for me, no changes to HTML Standard needed.
#journalism #annotations #indieweb
🔖 Bookmarked http://www.iasc-culture.org/THR/THR_article_2018_Spring_Jacobs.php IASC: The Hedgehog Review - Volume 20, No. 1 (Spring 2018) - Tending the Digital Commons: A Small Ethics toward the Future -

“It is common to refer to universally popular social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest as “walled gardens.” But they are not gardens; they are walled industrial sites, within which users, for no financial compensation, produce data which the owners of the factories sift and then sell. Some of these factories (Twitter, Tumblr, and more recently Instagram) have transparent walls, by which I mean that you need an account to post anything but can view what has been posted on the open Web; others (Facebook, Snapchat) keep their walls mostly or wholly opaque. But they all exercise the same disciplinary control over those who create or share content on their domain.”

#domain-of-ones-own #IndieWeb #silos