After this post I started to make a private spreadsheet of the EA forum users with the silliest takes, ranked by silliness. But I couldn’t finish, because while I was using the spreadsheet app a grey van pulled up and two men ordered me into the back. They’re telling me I’m being extradited to Europe to answer for my GDPR violations. Halp.
The joke is that the form of “data collection” you suggest is illegal according to GDPR would also imply my spreadsheet was illegal. Indeed, if recording inferences about the character of people you meet were illegal, any employer making a scoring list of candidates to interview would be breaking the law. This indicts virtually every organization above a current size.
Similarly, in the strict manner in which you cite #1, it’s probably also true that every charity in the UK is in violation of UK charity law. Most charities (for example) have employees that are paid materially for their work, that they don’t entirely give away to the charity. It’s also essentially impossible to avoid “benefitting” entirely, in some way, from successful charity efforts—for example in the form of boosted professional reputation and prestige among a certain class of people. If your reading of UK charity law were correct then charity in the UK would be largely illegal.
The obviously nonsensical legal implications of this post, combined with the gravity of the accusations, combined with the offensive suggestion that this is “whistleblowing” in any good-faith sense of the word, led me to respond with a joke instead of engage with it seriously. I do not regret not doing so, the downvotes someone applied to my entire profile notwithstanding.
FWIW, one of my previous employers believed (probably correctly?) that if they were asked by candidates to provide them with internal interview notes made about them, or to delete those notes, they would be forced to do so by the GDPR.
(I wouldn’t advise doing this unless you’re happy to annoy the employer in question, but I believe it to be within your rights.)
After this post I started to make a private spreadsheet of the EA forum users with the silliest takes, ranked by silliness. But I couldn’t finish, because while I was using the spreadsheet app a grey van pulled up and two men ordered me into the back. They’re telling me I’m being extradited to Europe to answer for my GDPR violations. Halp.
In any other context I would expect a reply this aggressively unhelpful to be heavily downvoted.
Are you saying
a) one or both of these activities was not illegal? (if so, why are they not?)
b) one or both was illegal, but it doesn’t matter because it was in the service of effective altruism?
c) something else? (what?)
The joke is that the form of “data collection” you suggest is illegal according to GDPR would also imply my spreadsheet was illegal. Indeed, if recording inferences about the character of people you meet were illegal, any employer making a scoring list of candidates to interview would be breaking the law. This indicts virtually every organization above a current size.
Similarly, in the strict manner in which you cite #1, it’s probably also true that every charity in the UK is in violation of UK charity law. Most charities (for example) have employees that are paid materially for their work, that they don’t entirely give away to the charity. It’s also essentially impossible to avoid “benefitting” entirely, in some way, from successful charity efforts—for example in the form of boosted professional reputation and prestige among a certain class of people. If your reading of UK charity law were correct then charity in the UK would be largely illegal.
The obviously nonsensical legal implications of this post, combined with the gravity of the accusations, combined with the offensive suggestion that this is “whistleblowing” in any good-faith sense of the word, led me to respond with a joke instead of engage with it seriously. I do not regret not doing so, the downvotes someone applied to my entire profile notwithstanding.
FWIW, one of my previous employers believed (probably correctly?) that if they were asked by candidates to provide them with internal interview notes made about them, or to delete those notes, they would be forced to do so by the GDPR.
(I wouldn’t advise doing this unless you’re happy to annoy the employer in question, but I believe it to be within your rights.)