Any exasperation in my post wasn't at you, it was at the law or the interpretation of the law. For me, anyone that enters a public competition should have a reasonable expectation that results will be published.

I agree with much of this - but on the other hand, aggregating a chunk of the data also transforms the data substantially and fundamentally.

For example, knowing that someone came 2nd at a poker tournament last week doesn't really cause any meaningful privacy harm - but seeing a string of poker results over years can.

No doubt as soon as a local newspaper is sued for publishing the results of fun run by a competitor who had their incapacity benefits stopped as a result, we will see further clarification added to the law...

I shared your point of view until a few months ago.
I am a guy in my early 40's, I graduated from a business school, I am currently looking for a new position.
It was a bit disturbing for the guy interviewing me to find on google that I had travelled multiple times to Macao and Manila to play poker. I felt like it didn't reflect too good to look like a degenerate gambler to the eye of a guy who has no real clue about poker.
I found that a bit annoying to be honest! Not that I am ashamed of playing but I consider poker as a hobby and therefore part of my private life.

The results of a public event are just facts, and are not intellectual property. Only someone with a specific license can broadcast video of an NFL football game, but anyone can report the score of the game.

In any case, someone participating in a major sporting event understands that the results of this will be made public, and they consent to this. However, they don't consent to every individual outlet that will eventually publish the results. An NFL's player contract says nothing about which newspapers or website will be able to publish his stats.

Similarly, it seems to me the solution is for the poker community to come to a consensus about which tournaments should be considered public events and which should be considered private, not which websites should should be able to publish results or which individuals should have their results published.

NickMPK,

You seem to be a smart and sensible guy. What you advocate might well be a sensible option to consider if creating a poker-focused version of this law. Your posts here seem like reasonable contributions to the policy debate about what the law should be.

I don't really have much of a view on what the law should be, but am merely informing you on what the law actually is. I'm not an expert, but merely some poor guy who has to work through this stuff in my professional life. If a customer writes to me at work asking to be removed from our list of customers, we do so. We do so because we're required to by the legislation.

Your proposal, however, is simply not the option that the EU has chosen. They've been much more prescriptive, much more controlling, and chosen a very different path.

What you describe (especially in the final paragraph) is entirely contradictory to the outline of the law, which is based around empowering individuals to control their own data. I guess if you don't like it, you can take it up with your representative in the European Union.

I understand what you are saying, but I don't get why major tournament results couldn't be considered beyond the scope of this law.

In other words, legally speaking, what is the difference between publishing the results of a WSOP tournament and publishing the box score of an NFL game under the GDPR?

Legally speaking, a regulatory lawyer who covers the EU market would be the best person to ask this.

If you believe a service is "in breach" of GDPR guidelines, the ICO has an official page where individuals can submit a formal complaint.

https://ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint/

ICO HELPLINE: 0303 123 1113

NFL games have only professional players in them, while in poker tournaments many amateurs participate. Amateur players in any sport CAN have more interest in their participation/results being unknown while the general public has less interested in their information than that of professionals.

That doesn't mean that all their results should always be hidden, but they certainly have a stronger case with regard to the GDPR than a NFL player.

This seems exactly backwards to me. A professional player would have a much greater interest (potentially large sums of money), in being able to have some of their results deleted.

I could buy that their is a greater -public- interest in the professional game. (I have no idea what sort of legal test the GDPR uses in balancing these interests.) . But it seems like that argument falls right in line with the suggestion I have been making for poker to differential between those (larger) events in the public interests, and smaller events that should remain private.

This applies to individuals, not organisations, and only in the EU, so I've changed your question slightly. I'm also not a professional expert on this stuff - this is just my layman's understanding of what the law now requires.


I don't think there's any meaningful difference (as far as GDPR is concerned) between announcing the winner of a major poker tournament and the winner of a professional sporting contest. In both cases, that's self-evidently newsworthy.

However, in my opinion, building a long-term database of customers participating in events is different to building a long-term database of professional performers participating in events. To my very non-expert understanding, the key difference is that the GDPR rules require informed consent, and they require individuals to have the ability to withdraw consent.

I guess the follow up question is, "What if Novak Djokovic asked the BBC to remove their listing of his tennis results?" I don't know the answer to that question - presumably there would be some sort of argument about what's reasonable, and the lawyers would argue about it. These rules have only been in effect for a few months, so there's not much history/case law/etc. to look to.

that makes alot of sense and one honorable reason to want your name removed. Though, there are likely dozens of other sites that you would have to clean up as well to accomplish your goal. There are some cheap web tools that help you control how you show up on web / social media searches.

I'm total layman as well and only dealt with GDPR contractually once thus far.

IMO its a TOTAL MESS.

Though the intentions were good, they went WAY overboard. Authors of legislation did a lousy job thinking through the ripple effect on companies large and small.

Barristers in Europe are going to make major $$$ in the next year helping companies sort through all this and mitigate their liability. Lawyers always win.

PTLou,

I deeply agree with the criticisms that you and NickMPK have made here about what the law should be; my comments above are only meant to be a very amateur explanation of what the law actually is.

even amateur explanation is useful. so thx

It's a maze of complexity and tangles.

If you think all poker winnings should be public knowledge, do you also think all sports bet winnings should be published too? Should lottery winners have no right to public anonymity?

Who has suggested that all poker winnings should be public knowledge? Textbook example of a strawman there.

They won't remove US players

Seems like they're reading this thread with their improved reasoning

Serving the community while forcing players to be opt-in......

They are ignoring me. Wrote them 4 days ago. How long did u guys wait for the response?

Public HendonMob results definitely hurt some players. Eric Hicks from Live at the Bike is a good example. It definitely hurts his EV in cash games that you can look him up and see he final tabled a WSOP event this year and last year.

Perhaps my point wasn't as clear as I thought. Yes, that exemption is available to journalists. But it's also available to everyone else so long as they qualify in substance.

Contrary to the response you received, you can indeed request to be forgotten in connection with news articles. There's a need to balance Article 8 rights against Article 10 rights (in other words we agree that free speech is super important but not at the universal expense of the right to a private life). The fresher the news article the less likely you are to be able to get your personal data erased from it, but it's plain wrong to say that this isn't possible. The more common approach though is to make requests to search engines with the effect that they de-list articles, since that has much of the practical effect without removing the source article itself.

I think all tournament poker results should be public knowledge, and I don't think anybody should be allowed to appear as "unknown".

If pushed, I could agree to "festival only" results being reported, which would allow casinos to only have to produce a GDPR compliant waiver for special events rather than every single night (but to be clear, if a player doesn't want to sign the waiver, then they're not playing).

That strawman just became the wicker man