Ex post facto laws should be prohibited in any civilized country.

Holding data is on ongoing behavior. It isn't an ex post facto law to change how a company handles it in the future. Coca-Cola can't sell you a soda with cocaine in it just because it was legal when they started their business.

What would make it an ex post facto law is if companies were punished for how they handled data before the law was created. It is perfectly reasonable to punish them if they continue that same behavior after the law was created.

True. But for Coke, at least, I wish they'd "grandfathered" it in!

I think it would greatly complicate things if cold-storage backups count as holding data.

Some poor kid would have to go and load all the tapes and redact it.

An excellent comment.

Every privacy policy and terms of service document is an ex post facto "law" if it was changed even once.

Public laws and private contracts are two different things.

For one, you can typically opt out of the latter, but not the former.

Copying my comment from a couple of days ago as that is simply not practically true:

>All my university systems run on Microsoft. All my future employers' systems will probably run on Microsoft. All public transport in my country effectively requires an app which is tied to either Google or Apple operating systems to buy tickets. Schools require students as young as 6 years old to have an iPad or chromebook tied to Google or Apple.

>There is no real choice in our modern society to "not give your personal data" to these megacorps.

You'd have to be homeless, unemployed, unbanked and practically a hermit to even approach "opting out" from this private law. That's not a real choice.

The solution is to have goverments use Linux which many do, use libre office suites, sponsor projects that government project's outsourcing companies use. Web interfaces for all services without needing to signup for a third party EULA.

Sadly though, that still doesn't resolve other problems.

How many people have gmail addresses? Use Google products, such as Google's VOIP service? How many cars, or home(now) come with such products built in?

I guess what I'm getting at is, even if you do your best to purge yourself, and even if you try to purge the government, you're still left dealing with people, and if you email them at gmail, then Google still gets the entire conversation.

And if we somehow manage to create at "Don't store this" situation, will it be like when the Canadian government passed a law, forcing Google, Facebook, etc to pay for linking to stories? Just as Australia did?

They're effectively dropped all Canadian news sources.

So, would they "drop" users who have requested no data storage? That is, you cannot email anyone at gmail? It goes into a dead hole?

I suspect that freemium, as a business model, is going to be completely incompatible with democracy.

Google just recently updated their ToS for purging accounts that aren't active thereby dropping accounts which were part of free tier.

Yeah, it's typically easier to emigrate out of the reach of your law's country than to avoid the reach of these trillion-dollar-worth corporations.

Or with enough laws, every law can be applied selectively

WWCD

Crime against humanity didn't even exist as a concept (let alone a law) before Nuremberg, do you think the condamnation of the nazis there as “uncivilized”?

The retroactive criminalisation at Nuremberg absolutely was controversial at the time. It only got pushed through because of US instance. It is literally an example of might making right.

Seems like an extreme counter example. In the spirit of the parent post I guess you could argue theft, murder etc. was already illegal?

Also, it is morally different when you want to punish lawmakers.

> Seems like an extreme counter example.

It is voluntarily ridiculously extreme, because the parent comment was itself ridiculously categorical.

The thing is: most of the time, retro-active laws are dangerous tools that should be used rarely and with caution, but sometimes and when some people have been doing something that they knew was evil even though not technically illegal, it can make sense to punish them with laws designed after the fact.

Sure fair enough. That is the problem with many rules of thumb, where people interpret "all" and "always" to mean all and always.

Especially evident in programming. E.g. "premature optimization is the root of all evil".

That’s one line everyone remembers snipped from somewhat more nuanced context.

Knuth said: "Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%."

Oh ... ye well Knuth makes my point. :)