Having done a fair amount of important-but-niche work.. yeah. There are genuinely very few incentives to do this sort of work. It's very much to the point where doing stuff like this necessitates being aggressive towards people who aren't used to that sort of interaction, which is socially extremely difficult to do. And that often even means being aggressive towards colleagues who tend to have softer opinions on things. The alternative is languishing in hidden problems. The folks who end up doing this work, IME, have been burned pretty hard in the past and have decided to continue to wade through the potential of being burned again. Not many people do that.
Ultimately, there aren't that many people who have the technical knowledge, the ideology (that the internet should be for the good of the general public, not for corporations), the dedication and the time - and those who do exist are split between multiple issues (e.g. preventing the CSAM bill).
In this case, it's specifically that not all DPAs are doing their job correctly: some due to understaffing, others arguably due to ideological reasons.
I partially blame the GDPR itself - I still stand behind the spirit of that law, but it's IMHO not strict enough (or has too many loopholes): I think the selling of personal data to third parties should have been banned outright.
Not OP, but Max Schrems (and that's why the decisions related to this are called Schrems, Schrems II et al.). To be fair, he leads NOYB (so it's not just him), but he has a personal interest here.
We don't know the name, the article states that the org is putting itself in front. I am not surprised someone doesn't want to get entangled with Meta and use his/her own resources to fight this beast.
Oh, really? Even more opaque. You don’t need to be of voting age (??) in order to be an activist or political in some sort of way. I’m pretty sure that Greta Thunberg wasn’t when she became famous.
Anyway, if this thread leaves you frustrated then maybe just don't participate in it?
The EU has 100's of millions of people, not all of them are in a position to bring this kind of effort because it requires bringing suit (which children may be able to do but don't generally do) and a very large chunk of a lifetime's worth of dedication. So in an attempt to roughly indicate the order of magnitude of difference between the number of people that could have taken action but didn't I used the 300 million figure. I haven't checked it for accuracy and Greta Thunberg notwithstanding the fact that you bring her up as an example is exactly because such individuals are so rare which is exactly the point that I was making.
Without Schrems for privacy and without Thunberg for climate change these subjects would get less attention than they do, and both of them have been instrumental in making meaningful change when in fact both of these subjects should concern the vast majority of that 300 million, give or take.
