You Know GDPR Is Good Based on Who Hates It

It is also definitely true that the regulations are largely written by people who do not understand the tech they're regulating and its potential. Again, not some weird controversial point.

With every next leak where my full name, PESEL (that's like SSN here in Poland), email, phone number become semi-public and... nothing happens, I am becoming more convinced that we are annoying ourselves for nothing. Just degrading our digital lives and generating tons of legal digital text no one reads for no benefit of anyone involved.

At the same time, the very people who pretend to defend my privacy, oppose Tor, Signal, anonymity online, and other tools that definitely benefit me.

successful person → unusual trait And infer: unusual trait → success

The most popular example of this in tech (that never seems to die) is when people notice moments where Steve Jobs was an asshole, or he said no directly to customers, and infer they need to be more like this because it's the unusual trait they're missing and need to emulate.

FDR's hatred was a byproduct of his consequential actions. But consequential actions are not the only things that produce hatred. In fact, rather petty actions can cause someone to feel hatred.

If you use hatred as a proxy for importance, you are effectively saying: "All impactful people are hated, therefore all hated people are impactful." This is logically equivalent to saying "All dogs are animals, therefore all animals are dogs." The metric has zero predictive power because the set of "hated people" is vastly larger than the set of "impactful people."

Friction is also terrible metric for progress. I would argue privacy has actually gotten worse due to the banners because if you decide you're not going to sign in to do something like a Google search (so it's not tied to your account), then you're immediately punished with a nag box. So you actually decide you'd rather stay signed in so you don't get nagged. Even if you're in favour of using the government, you should be using friction as a counter-signal. For example, switching to the Euro, reduced friction. Standardising to USB-C, you could argue this reduces friction for consumers.

Was it a PITA? Sometimes, yes.

Was it stressful having a conversation with Legal to determine whether we had a PII leak under the GDPR terms that would mean we had to reach out to customers? Definitely.

But you know what? That’s the cost of doing business. The outcome for EU citizens was that their data is in a better place than it otherwise would have been. And that’s a good thing.

Also with the new package law in EU. I believe all these laws are how EU creates employment for their citizens. With almost every law they introduce, another new position is created in private as well as government offices and in a slowly aging continent that’s a good way to keep people employed when there isn’t much of a prospect

The entities forced to show them would rather not, and thus make it as annoying as possible for you. They then use this to weaken support for the GDPR.

Shame on the people making stuff like this.

That said I am generally happy with GDPR.

E.g. the nag problem would have been solved simply and effectively with something like do-not-track header (probably as OS setting, as apps are often even worse than websites with tracking). Also enforcement of obvious violations taking years and years, especially against large corporations, means it's just violated all the time.

EU also failed to give good interpretation guidelines early on, causing massive piles of overjealous lawyer CYA red tape and just silly stuff like removing names from apartment buzzers.

> If the rules are so terrible, why did nobody choose market exit?

Because major players don't particularly mind such rules; the public doesn't care about their data all that much and everything will tick on as usual with some nag banners and compliance officers.

The problem is the major players aren't going to be European because it is no longer legal for EU companies to get started by doing what the US companies did to get started. There is a reason the EU is backseat driving US software companies - EU industrial policy killed off the EU ones in the crib (to be fair that wasn't the GDPR, the GDPR is just part of the same anti-growth regulatory pattern). They died so young we've never really even learned what their names would have been.

EDIT I'll point at companies like Uber. It looked pretty illegal for most of its early years, until it could afford enough lobbyists to legalise its business model. Never would have worked in the EU.

It is all working as intended.

The tell tale is bodies like ICO being powerless when it comes to enforcing it. You've been screwed by big corporation? ICO will shrug.

The web has gotten so much uglier as a result of GDPR.

Try to do marketing ad campaign as small eshop owner in EU!