A few months ago, we noted that the EU was working on its new General Data Protection Regulation and Data Protective Directive — and warned that it was putting free speech and privacy on a crash course. We also had a podcast about this with Daphne Keller, from Stanford‘s Center for Internet and Society. While the intentions of the data protection efforts sound good, the actual impact could be quite devastating. The idea is that all these companies are collecting lots of data, and individuals should have more control over what‘s collected and how it‘s used (and abused). Conceptually, that sounds really valuable. But, in practice it can be a disaster — especially if the people who are focused on privacy/data protection don‘t think about or understand the consequences of what they‘re doing.

And now, the EU has announced that the new data protection rules have been finalized — and while there‘s plenty in there that may be useful, these new rules are almost certainly going to create some new dangerous consequences.