Thread · 8 tweets · 5 Aug 2019

If you’re looking for a great work of fiction to read on the beach this summer, this @ITIFdc report on the cost of privacy regulation is a great choice.

They massively overestimate the number of DPOs needed, estimating indirectly somehow through the number of accountants. Most business make money (that stick around, at least), far fewer carry out "regular and systematic monitoring of data subjects on a large scale." Cost: $6.3bn!

They then double-count the cost of data rights implementation and support, ignoring the fact that they would normally function from the same infrastructure. This adds up to $7bn.

This includes $5bn in data quality cost but they don't at all account for the value of data quality. The word "quality" might be a hint of some kind?

Not counting benefits is an easy way to spot a made-to-order report. It doesn't even pretend to be reality-based, it's just hatchet talking points. Easy fixes: • Increased innovation from less distortion from G+FB. • Healthier media ecosystem. • Decreased data breach harm.

"The GDPR imposes opt-in consent" also known as "we knew what results we wanted so there was no point in doing our homework about GDPR anyway".

Knowing what data you actually need and what you intend to do with it would apparently cost the US economy $71bn annually. I had no idea that not knowing what to do with data was such a money-maker!

This is followed by all sorts of number-wrangling over ad revenue which seems largely arbitrary, and also makes strange assumptions about first-party data. Either way, as a rule of thumb: one-sided reports usually exist just to give lobbyists talking points. No exception here.