I must've read the phrase "thinly veiled threat" at least a dozen time in this thread, yet honestly don't understand where the threat was.
Maybe the last sentence where they put a deadline on it, but that part was strange anyways since they explicitly said this is NOT a CCPA request, so that deadline doesn't even apply to this email.
The person seems to just be asking questions about the process and came off to me more as curious than threatening. Whatever veil there was most definitely was not thin in my opinion.
> Maybe the last sentence where they put a deadline on it, but that part was strange anyways since they explicitly said this is NOT a CCPA request, so that deadline doesn't even apply to this email.
That's the threat, yeah. And yes, it's not technically correct--but, as many others have pointed out, you don't need to have a correct legal claim to inflict thousands of dollars of legal fees on a target. Hell, part of what those legal fees pay for is an expert to explain whether or not that deadline applies.
More than that, most people simply do not have the time to memorize laws, or to get the legal background required to understand whether a law applies. This is partly a problem with laws being complex and having their own jargon--but that doesn't excuse what's going on here.
Yeah this one is weird to me. How many "I sent GDPR requests to all the services I use and this is what happened" blog posts did we read when GDPR first went into effect?
Should academic research be held to a high bar? Yes. Did this cross a line? From the response and subsequent apology, clearly. But the outrage here feels at least a little disproportionate.
Then when on the receiving side, view it as a threat and freak out.
Note: I'm ignoring the whole lying aspect for now, because it isn't pertinent to my argument.
So it sounds like it's good for consumers, and a nightmare for producers. Seems the crux of the problem is the law itself.