In a user-interface design meeting over a regulatory compliance implementation:
User: “We’ll need to input a city.”
Dev: “Should we validate that city against the state, zip code, and country?”
User: “You are going to make me enter all that data? Ugh…then make it a drop-down. I select the city and the state, zip code auto-fill. I don’t want to make a mistake typing any of that data in.”
Me: “I don’t think a drop-down of every city in the US is feasible.”
Manage: “Why? There cannot be that many. Drop-down is fine. What about the button? We have a few icons to choose from…”
Me: “Uh..yea…there are thousands of cities in the US. Way too much data to for anyone to realistically scroll through”
Dev: “They won’t have to scroll, I’ll filter the list when they start typing.”
Me: “That’s not really the issue and if they are typing the city anyway, just let them type it in.”
User: “What if I mistype Ch1cago? We could inadvertently be out of compliance. The system should never open the company up for federal lawsuits”
Me: “If we’re hiring individuals responsible for legal compliance who can’t spell Chicago, we should be sued by the federal government. We should validate the data the best we can, but it is ultimately your department’s responsibility for data accuracy.”
Manager: “Now now…it’s all our responsibility. What is wrong with a few thousand item drop-down?”
Me: “Um, memory, network bandwidth, database storage, who maintains this list of cities? A lot of time and resources could be saved by simply paying attention.”
Manager: “Memory? Well, memory is cheap. If the workstation needs more memory, we’ll add more”
Dev: “Creating a drop-down is easy and selecting thousands of rows from the database should be fast enough. If the selection is slow, I’ll put it in a thread.”
DBA: “Table won’t be that big and won’t take up much disk space. We’ll need to setup stored procedures, and data import jobs from somewhere to maintain the data. New cities, name changes, ect. ”
Manager: “And if the network starts becoming too slow, we’ll have the Networking dept. open up the valves.”
Me: “Am I the only one seeing all the moving parts we’re introducing just to keep someone from misspelling ‘Chicago’? I’ll admit I’m wrong or maybe I’m not looking at the problem correctly. The point of redesigning the compliance system is to make it simpler, not more complex.”
Manager: “I’m missing the point to why we’re still talking about this. Decision has been made. Drop-down of all cities in the US. Moving on to the button’s icon ..”
Me: “Where is the list of cities going to come from?”
<few seconds of silence>
Dev: “Post office I guess.”
Me: “You guess?…OK…Who is going to manage this list of cities? The manager responsible for regulations?”
User: “Thousands of cities? Oh no …no one is our area has time for that. The system should do it”
Me: “OK, the system. That falls on the DBA. Are you going to be responsible for keeping the data accurate? What is going to audit the cities to make sure the names are properly named and associated with the correct state?”
DBA: “Uh..I don’t know…um…I can set up a job to run every night”
Me: “A job to do what? Validate the data against what?”
Manager: “Do you have a point? No one said it would be easy and all of those details can be answered later.”
Me: “Almost done, and this should be easy. How many cities do we currently have to maintain compliance?”
User: “Maybe 4 or 5. Not many. Regulations are mostly on a state level.”
Me: “When was the last time we created a new city compliance?”
User: “Maybe, 8 years ago. It was before I started.”
Me: “So we’re creating all this complexity for data that, realistically, probably won’t ever change?”
User: “Oh crap, you’re right. What the hell was I thinking…Scratch the drop-down idea. I doubt we’re have a new city regulation anytime soon and how hard is it to type in a city?”
Manager: “OK, are we done wasting everyone’s time on this? No drop-down of cities...next …Let’s get back to the button’s icon …”

Simplicity 1, complexity 0.

Four meetings today.

Legal was not involved in legal agreement changes until I refused to make them without Legal signing off. Legal changed several things, leading to:

Project scope changed size from large to minuscule to small to medium.

Details changed at every step.

Despite being incredibly structured and process-heavy, people at this company are so disorganized. 😕

I got so many concerns/questions about the EU chat control and the future. Sorry for my long rant lol:
1) What about projects that are on life support and no active development?
2) What about chat application in video games or the chat service on the website of a local shop
3) What about false flags? Like that parent who got into legal trouble for sharing a picture of his kid with a doctor to get a medical opinion on some skin condition. (might misremember the details)
4) What about false flags like instagram banning accounts and forwarding it to the police department and over-exhausting the resources of the police (accidental 'DDOS' of their personel)
5) What if the content shared in country A is legally OK but not in country B. What if you then travel there? Or if your participant is from that country B.
6) What about content that is taboo but should be OK to discussed? Like puberty or hormonal discussions online? Some subreddits like "stopsmoking" is now also regional banned by Reddit in the UK to avoid any unneeded risks. That is bad. YouTube had some problem where adult content existed on their platform but labeled as educational.
7) What if you encrypt messages before sending it. Will you be banned just in case? What if you need support with an app and you send an encrypted application crash log that came from your computer, will you now be banned just in case?
8) What if you like privacy and have those apps for innocent purposes. Is having those apps now illegal
9) What if criminals use apps from Asia or Africa or somewhere where this law is not present/enforced. Or what if they create a simple app with this encryption. It is not difficult to make one.
10) Before 2001, airport security was very lax but then 9/11 happened and the security increased. It never went back to the state before. Since they have or will have this check, what will them stop it from expanding it after the next disaster of an unrelated accident (like terrorist attack).
11) What if those services miss a case? Will the company that allows this to be send now have legal trouble?
12) What if users are using metaphors or practice self-censorship to avoid flagged words? We see it with monetization in social media (like murder or killing is replaced with "unaliving")
13) It will be just an other problem to start a new company with limited budget. So start-ups will just have a bit harder time to break into the market.
14) this might just push users away from mainstream options
15) it's just an other attack vector for hackers to use
16) Do we want to have private companies be able to scan our messages because they are contracted by the government? They can have their own bias to satisfy their shareholders. What if they are invested by the Big Oil so critic towards the Big Oil is altered? How certain can you be this won't happen now or in the future. Reddit Admin did that before so who knows at this point.
17) Anonymity will disappear.
18) Different companies verify users and store this data so this seems like a major cyberrisk and identity theft waiting to happen
19) fragmentation of users. it is now annoying that some family or friends don't use whatsapp but use telegram and the other way around. You might need +5 chat application to keep contact and lose social relationships.
20) Is AI detected messages even legal proof in court?
21) What if you talk about video games and flag the AI system this way? Or use abbreviation from a niche community that also overlaps with flagged words (like checkpoint being abbreviated as CP) or just the language with poor support or use a 'dialect' in your chat that trips up the software.
22) What if your phone is stolen and they send those messages in your name or this is done remotely.
23) What if you are sharing old family pictures and there is 1 and only 1 odd picture that just barely trips up the system.
24) Games like 'Beyond human' also has gameplay that hurts a fictional child which fits the storyline and acts as shock value. Will this be banned
25) The newer population will see this as normal so what will they find acceptable if they can now vote

Me: Ok, this sounds like a good idea, however we need to consult the Act to ensure we're not breaking any laws by requesting this new information and making it mandatory.

Boss: I am trying to ensure good database management and data design principles, why can't you just agree with me?

Me:... I agree with you... But changing up the process like this may put us in hot water, let's just check to ensure we're good on the legal front --

Boss: The law is just a guide. My primary concern and your concern should be the design of this database and ensuring we stick to good data management principles!

Me and other technical staff: 👀