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Comment by semperdark | Hacker News Reader

It's astounding to me that people believe they're entitled to force free services to provide them extra features by the force of law.

You're not allowed to launch a service that provides X, and if you want to, you must also include X + Y + Z.

Am I allowed to even open a port to a server on my local machine that allows users to voluntarily enter some information and does something with it, without being subjected to the full force of the legal system?

I have some experience with the US medical software industry, and this sort of feature-checklist regulation doesn't improve anything. All it does is lock in the existing players and prevent any innovations that aren't explicitly outlined in the law.

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> It's astounding to me that people believe they're entitled to force free services to provide them extra features by the force of law.

> You're not allowed to launch a service that provides X, and if you want to, you must also include X + Y + Z.

If you stop for a bit you'll realize that most things in society work like that. It's called regulation. Once you get used to it you'll stop being astounded and wonder how things were ever done differently.

Right, that's fine in the real world, where the existence of something affects you. Real objects take up physical space, and can be noisy, polluting, or inaccessible.

Nobody is forcing you to look at, interact with, or even acknowledge the existence of my local web server. There is no stronger sense of the word "voluntary" than the one that can be used to describe web services. My service doesn't even exist to you, unless you explicitly choose to engage with it.

You, on the other hand, believe that it should not be allowed to exist for other people (at legal gunpoint!), unless it conforms to the features that you believe it should have.

This is more akin to not being allowed to invite people into my home, unless my bathroom and kitchen meet certain (arbitrary, non-structural) requirements.

>This is more akin to not being allowed to invite people into my home, unless my bathroom and kitchen meet certain (arbitrary, non-structural) requirements.

Like fire code? :)

I was debating whether to remove that sentence, and ended up adding the (non-structural) part because I though someone might take the analogy that way. Note that fire codes in particular don't exist in many places, including much of the U.S.

Nobody is going to die from not exporting their data - except in medical software, where the current U.S. feature checklist regulations haven't helped. For many websites, GDPR is next to pointless while adding broad legal requirements.

You're making this argument as if the whole FB/Cambridge Analytica thing hadn't happened. There is power in these systems and when they're affecting our governmental structures we have a vested interest in regulating them.

This is perfectly analogous to the real world where e.g. pollution has tangible negative externalities. It will always be the case that when responsive governments exist, and a thing comes into existence that people perceive as a threat, people will leverage the government to mitigate that threat.

If your home were perched on a cliff above a school playground, to use a contrived example, the townspeople would have a keen interest in the integrity of your home including the kitchen and bathroom.

The same is true in many other cases. For example, employment law - nobody forces people to work for me, yet there are many restrictions on what I can write in the contract.

Defending a laissez-faire model of society, only with restrictions on externalities, is reasonable, but it's also very far from how societies currently operate. The GDPR is not an exception. In fact, not even on websites - the Data Protection Directive, from 1995, already implemented restrictions on how EU sites can be run. The GDPR is only an expansion on that.

You were subject to the full force of the legal system way before you set up a port on a server.

And you can totally set up a port on a server to allow users to voluntarily enter some information and do stuff with it. The law does not prevent that at all.

I think that you're misunderstanding the spirit of the "full force" comment. The fact that I'm subject to the "full force of the legal system" to with regards to preventing murder, doesn't justify every new regulation and its effects.

Does the law prevent it, if I don't want to spend time adding a full account verification system for personal data dumps, permanent data deletion, and other requirements?

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