I'm going to avoid the snarky "hire an attorney" answer but once you get past that necessary first step I do have a few tips:
* get comfortable reading legal documents, this will allow you to have more
intelligent conversations with your attorney
* don't let your attorney make your business decisions, one of their jobs is to
point out risks, one of your jobs (owner/ceo/leadership) is to figure out how
to mitigate risk but that is not the same thing as avoiding all risks
* learn to draft legalese, it will help minimize your attorney's billable hours
> Conservatives wouldn't complain if private companies were censoring and cancelling left-leaning content. They'd be out there defending private property rights and corporate freedom to act. It's transparently political.
I think you are confusing two very different things.
Criticizing Ebay for banning particular books, or AWS for dropping Parlor, or Twitter for banning various conservatives is not in contradiction with the libertarian/conservative idea that private entities should have the freedom to manage their business as they see fit.
Arguing for limited government oversight/power in these situations is orthogonal to criticizing the decisions on their own merits.
That doesn't mean their choices are somehow immune from public criticism.
I realize that clarity is in short supply in online discussions, but mostly I think people that are reacting negatively are just asserting that they disagree with the decision and not that a law has been broken or that the government should step in and force the decision to be reversed.
I haven't seen a good summary of what parts of the withdrawn books were considered inappropriate, but my understanding is that the stronger objection has been to political cartoons that Theodor Seuss Geisel created.
I've not seen any assertions (never mind evidence) that the children's books contained "severe racist overtones". To be clear, I'm pushing back on the "severe" adjective. There clearly have been assertions about racist overtones in the children's books, just not "severe" racist overtones -- at least that is my understanding.
Unfortunately I guess it would be inappropriate to actually post the objectionable material for discussion since it has been made clear lately that there is no "use-mention" distinction permitted on these matters.
We are therefore rapidly finding ourselves in a situation where the most easily offended person wields immense power to shutdown speech and commerce by simply asserting that something offends them and there is no recourse to challenge their opinion, it must be accepted without discussion.
I find this situation appalling and rapidly approaching frightening.
> it's madness that the economic impact is supposed to just stop at landlords, moneylenders, etc.
Who is advocating this position that you think is "madness"? This is an evolving situation that individuals, local, state, and national officials are figuring out as we go along. There is no consensus on any of this and the response needs to be (and actually is) distributed not centralized, IMHO.
Never mind the fact that the huge difficulty with this situation is that the ultimate impact is unknown at this point. How many people will need to be hospitalized? What treatment plans will be discovered? What is the impact of putting the economy on life-support for weeks? Will social distancing be enough to stop the spread?
Why were they in an imbalanced situation? In this particular case, I believe it was a trial. So parents could have withheld consent with no negative consequences as far as I can tell.
I realize that this particular situation is about facial recognition, but I was trying to point out that this ruling changes the game for everything, basically creating a situation where the only way for a data controller to minimize legal risk would be to get prior authorization from the data authority. That is a problematic.
In the more general case, I was under the impression that informed consent was sufficient to authorize a data controller to collect/process private information and so the ruling didn't make sense to me. I'm using "informed consent" here as a short hand for all the applicable GDPR requirements on consent (reasonable language, etc).
It isn't clear to me from this language in Recital 43 though how a data controller with an "imbalance" relative to the data subject could easily get clarity on any particular use case. It also seems strange that in this case there was deemed an imbalance between the schools and the parents (I'm assuming here that parents are indeed authorized to give consent in their role as parent/guardian). If parents are in an imbalanced situation regarding school attendance, then pretty much all government relationships are imbalanced.
If the school/parent relationship is considered imbalanced and the imbalance language isn't specific to a government data controller, then it would appear that every data controller (government entity or not) is in danger of having their relationship deemed "imbalanced" and the data collection subject to analysis by the data authority at any time.
It seems like this ruling destroys the clarity of "consent" and replaces it with "(consent AND balanced relationship) OR (imbalanced relationship AND legally adequate reason AND prior approval from regulator AND consent)"
Just think about the way modern media companies constantly shame and stigmatize people. How are you going to even define when someone is "shamed" or "stigmatized"? Aren't there people who should be shamed and stigmatized?
This seems completely unworkable and guaranteed to make absolutely no one happy other than the lawyers making money off of all the frivolous legal disputes.
In both cases the vendor is refusing to conduct business with the customer due to religious beliefs. Why do you think it is OK for the customer to have to find a new photographer in one case but not a different baker in the other?
I really have a hard time with the idea that the government is expected to pick the "right" set of beliefs to back on what should just be a voluntary transaction. Either both parties agree to conduct business or they don't. I realize that a laissez faire approach to commerce is not what we have today but I would prefer it over asking the government to mediate. And I do realize that would allow people and businesses to discriminate, but that just represents a business opportunity for someone else.
Is it your opinion that "religious bigotry" is not protected by the Constitution?
How are you going to define that outside your preferred scenario of bigotry against gays? Do you intend to insist (by law) that Orthodox Jews, for example, work on Saturdays because that is more convenient for you and that that they are being intolerant of your beliefs for no rational reason?
What about Orthodox Jewish wedding photographer? Are they required to work for you on a Saturday or is it OK for them too refuse you service based on their religious beliefs?
Can you explain how you are balancing the notion of freedom of religion, freedom of association, and freedom of speech here?
It sounds to me like you're are arguing that those rights aren't worth protecting for the baker and you are choosing to protect the customer's right to ... what exactly? What "right" is being protected in your analysis?