ritswd

No, it wasn’t like that. Remember that while computer technology was fairly mainstream, it wasn’t nearly as engrained into our lives as today. So people were talking about a worst-case scenario that involved technological things: potential power outages, administrations maybe shutting down, some public transportation maybe shutting down, … To me, it felt like people were getting ready for being potentially majorly inconvenienced, but that they weren’t at all freaking out.

I do remember the first few days of January 2000 felt like a good fun joke. “All that for this!”

I’ve been telling people that the notion that the ER lets poor people die in the US is false; instead, they make you wish you did.

Mint uses an OAuth token (I think through Plaid). This is not the same thing as sharing a username/password, and is authorized by your bank, since they provide the OAuth flow; otherwise OAuth wouldn’t work in the first place.

Right, and in my case to be clear, it was all businesses headquartered in the US, doing business in Europe, and getting compliant with Europe’s GDPR. I have no idea if it was any different if the businesses were headquartered in Europe (guessing no), but I thought I’d confirm that was the situation.

Yeah, there were different interpretations there from different counsels. It went from “well, they put it there and we don’t store it anywhere else, so nobody is preventing them from removing it, we don’t need to do anything”, with some “oh this field is actually durably stored somewhere else (such as an olap db or something), so either we need to scrub it there too when someone changes a value, or we can just add a ‘don’t share personal information in this field’ little label on the form”; to doing that kind of stuff on all fields.

Overall, the feeling was that we needed to do best effort depending on how likely it would be for a field to durably contain personal info, for it to smell a judge’s smell test that it was done in good faith, as is often the case in legal matters.

Reposting what I posted here a while ago.

Companies abiding by the GDPR are not required to delete your account or content at all, only Personally Identifiable Information (PII). Lemmy instances are unlikely to ask for info such as real name, phone number, postal address, etc; the only PII I can think of is the email that some (not all) instances request. Since it’s not a required field on all instances, I’m going to guess that the value of this field does not travel to other instances.

Therefore, if you invoked the GDPR to request your PII to be deleted, all that would need to happen is for the admin of your instance to overwrite the email field of your account with something random, and it would all be in compliance. Or they could also choose the delete your account, if they prefer.

Source: I’m a software engineer who was tasked at some point with aligning multi-billion-dollar businesses to the GDPR, who had hundreds of millions of dollars in liability if they did it wrong and therefore took it very seriously. I am not a lawyer or a compliance officer, but we took our directions from them directly and across several companies, that’s what they all told us.

Yeah, I think that’s probably more accurate than what I was thinking, and that leaving belongs to acceptance rather than depression.

I was actually aware of that, which is why I wrote depression/acceptance, meaning they probably moved from bargaining to either one of those, thinking either of those 2 stages could prompt people to leave. By fast-tracking, I meant that moved happened faster than they would have if the rebranding hadn’t happened. It’s still a fascinating bit, I have known about the stages of grief for a while, but only learned recently (like, this year) that they didn’t have to happen in order.

Nitpicking: I’d rephrase “playing an instrument” to “playing a first instrument”. I struggled as heck to learn the guitar as a young adult, while kids in my music class were having a much easier time; but once I got it after a while, all instruments I learned after that, even in my 40s, were a ton easier.

I think it’s spot on. It’s people who were already going through the stages of grief, were kinda stuck in “bargaining” (like: “nah, Twitter is not really dead, it’ll come back”), and the symbolism there about Twitter really being gone-gone fast-tracked them to depression/acceptance.

I mean, I guess that depends. History is littered with countries that got destroyed because they got suddenly wealthy, like what happened to Nauru; but also of countries that thrived and are still thriving on a well-protected, sustainably obtained natural resource. I’d be more worried if the situation was more sudden and taking people with their pants down, but it’s been a very slow burn over decades.

And to consider another looming environmental catastrophe: the currently rising water scarcity can’t scare you too much if you live next to one of the largest freshwater lakes in the world.