It would make sense that Phobos, like Earth's moon, was the result of an impacting object versus a captured asteroid. I would think that captured objects, such as D-class asteroids would eventually have an orbit degrade over the course of a few millennia.
I typed it, with my hands. So far it's 15 pages, 8800 words.
I'm worried that once I fill in the blanks and edit, my #1 supporter CLGrimes will be gone and I'll be skewered in the e-court of e-opinions. Can I count on you to wait for me?
If an EU citizen believes that their personally identifiable information was obtained without their consent, the EU GDPR allows firms to do an audit on the company. The citizen who filed the complaint would enlist help from a no-win-no-fee legal firm, meaning, if they don't win (with infractions being $10 million minimum), the citizen, who is now a client of the firm, would not be out any money. If they do win, most likely the firm would make a windfall after carving out their share of the proceeds.
Wait! I was under the impression that fines due to GDPR are just that, fines. They are paid to the government, not individuals. At most, getting fined due to non-compliance can suggest that if individuals bring civil lawsuits against the company, they may win and be awarded damages, the amount of which depends on how much damages they can prove they have incurred as a result of misuse of their data, not statutory amounts. Is that not the case? Is the fine actually paid to the individuals?
Or are your suggesting that some patriotic legal firms would do all the legwork for free so that the government treasury would get a boost?
Yes, your understanding is completely correct. Only EU member states can levy fines under the GDPR, and it's likely few will have any interest in trying to fine small businesses. Lawsuits are possible, but only for damages, and good luck showing any damages from a minor technical violation by a small SaaS tool. And without any prospect of large damages from a deep-pocketed defendant, good luck finding a law firm willing to work on contingency.
The whole thing is FUD, although mad props to the people behind the linked service for making a play at profiting from it.
I don't have a lot of actual information on this, but the buzz in my privacy professional listservs is that EU courts have been VERY expansive about what constitutes "damage" in related legal spheres, and that those of us coming from a US legal background should not rely on our instincts about what kinds of damage could actually create a cause of action worth suing over.
Cease and desist letters from predatory law firms are a very real thing, even in Europe. In Germany, entire law firms have been established for the sole purpose of collecting out-of-court settlement fees for small mistakes in websites' legal notices, which they find using automated searches: http://transblawg.eu/2003/10/13/u-s-comment-on-impressumgerm...
GDPR will give them new ammunition on a European scale.
No, some firm will ask you to pay $100,000 as private settlement because you make a mistake, or else they'll will have to seek remedy by filing a complaint on the EU courts, potentially costing you around 10M
But unlike copyright trolls, the law firm in question can't guarantee that paying the protection money will actually protect you from being reported, so there isn't the same incentive to pay. A protection racket only works if the mafia monopolizes the threat, otherwise any random thug could destroy their business.
Both amounts are lower bounds. "No win no fee" falls apart because the lawyers don't get a fee for a fine collected by the government, not because the fine is too small.
Fines are up to $10 million or 2%, but it can go up to $20 million or 4% of annual global revenue, whichever is higher. That percent, whichever is higher is the key. Facebook's 2017 revenue was ~40.7 Billion. Four percent of that amount isis ~1.6 billion
> if they don't win (with infractions being $10 million minimum
But all of the numbers you give are the maximum possible fines. The actual fines imposed by the regulators will always bee smaller than that.
You also said:
> The citizen who filed the complaint would enlist help from a no-win-no-fee legal firm,
That's not how the fines work. They're fines, paid to the regulator. They're not compensation paid to the victim. There's no payout for no-win-no-fee solicitors, and so they're not going to get involved.
I can't tell if this is a fake service or not, but blocking users from EU IP address ranges (which I'm assuming how it works) will still not stop the EU from following a trail of data that could originate from your organization.
That's the biggest thing from the EU's GDPR rules - what is your organization's data inventory, how does it map outside of your organization, and how are you securing PII?
If a complaint is made from someone who is an EU citizen, and another organization shows logs that they got this information from your web app or service, that will trigger an audit from the EU. Blocking access to a subset of IP ranges will do absolutely nothing to stop this, and will not stop the sharks once they have smelled blood.
In a sense, the EU has plain rules that you can protect against, unlike the FTC/FDA (for HIPPA etc) who are vague and will not disclose how you can protect your own organization.
After doing a cursory image search on Google for "VHS Tape" leads to a high res image that is in the public domain on Wikipedia [1]. Why the designer didn't use that stock image to begin with doesn't make any sense to me.
Great concept. I've never understood why there weren't pre-configured SaaS-based Rails templates out there. Thank you for your contribution to the community!
The page mentioned that Verizon cut deployments in 13 states, and the deployments that were made were not doing equitably. What recourse is there for companies that made this commitment and still exist today? Could Verizon still be on the hook for providing these services, and if so, how can it be enforced?
