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Comment by erentz | Hacker News Reader

I’m still not understanding the controversy and kickback around these regulations. The hysteria around GDPR has been silly.

My home country has a Privacy Act, it’s terribly weak and has little enforcement but the principals in it were drilled into me from the very start of my career. Customer data is really important. It must be kept private and not shared. And we should only have what we need to have for whatever we’re doing for them. I don’t know why those principals are so hard for people to swallow. Now in the states when I hear mobile carriers are selling my location data without my consent, and so on, I get completely irate. It boggles my mind why people think that kind of behavior should be allowed.

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> I don’t know why those principals are so hard for people to swallow.

The top comment from a post yesterday explains it very well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17165707

> Because Facebook and Google have been guided by the principal: if it's not illegal, it's ethical.

The problem with that philosophy is that if you've normalized any questionable behavior on the basis that it is legal, the natural response will be stronger legislation. The "unstated rules" around privacy and people's personal information have been broken.

Any ire at forthcoming regulation should be directed at the bad actors, like Facebook and Google.

> Any ire at forthcoming regulation should be directed at the bad actors, like Facebook and Google.

Agreed, but the buyers of said information should be scrutinized too. If they are willing to pay money for that information, what are they using it for?

These are separate Things with some overlap.

A Saas company that does nothing fishy with users data, may still be concerned with the harsh, company destroying penalties associated with GDPR. Indeed there have been dozens of discussions on HN about this. It may be FUD, but it’s real.

The other people are doing terrible things.

Please don’t assert the people in the first group are actually in the second.

It's probably better stated as:

> The people doing terrible things are trying to convince other companies that they will be destroyed by the GDPR

Perhaps. But the large fines are a concern without too much prompting from the problem companies.

Not saying the GDPR is bad, I’d personally like to see it applied every where.

Okay, so what was Ragnarok Online doing that it had to shut down?

Who knows? Probably fishy things, what other explanation is there?

How about: Not making enough money to actually update the codebase.

You can be doing good, normal things and still not be compliant with the law.

What good things can you be doing with my stored data that you don't need to run your service?

As I understand it, the law was passed because the representatives of the people of europe saw a misalignment between "normal" and "good" and decided to enforce it.

Misinterpreting the rules?

> harsh, company destroying penalties associated with GDPR

These are entirely imagined, most likely by Americans spreading FUD, or people interpreting the terms "maximum fine" as a minimum fine.

When it’s a largely opaque foreign regulator deciding where on the scale your fine will be I’d argue it’s irresponsible to consider anything less than the maximum when doing cost-benefit analysis.

It's a direct attack on memory; surreal to see tech people cheering on more restrictions on general purpose computing.

>I’m still not understanding the controversy and kickback around these regulations. The hysteria around GDPR has been silly.

Because it puts a whole bunch of people out of a job and ruins the user experience for many things. Every news site I go to I get greeted by a pop up that won't go away until I interact with it. Apparently similar things are happening with phone apps as well. And while this is happening I've read about people having their app revenue drop 90% in some cases.

We're not even a full week in yet, so we don't know what the full effects of this are going to be.

>It boggles my mind why people think that kind of behavior should be allowed.

It's not about whether data abuse is okay or not, but rather it's about the consequences of taking such a heavy-handed approach as GDPR did.

> Because it puts a whole bunch of people out of a job and ruins the user experience for many things.

No, really, it is the advertisers who ruined the experience in the first place. And almost every site tries to make you agree to data collection without giving you another option, or hiding the other option under several menus. That's why I closed the TC page.

Wow, you weren't joking. The menu they present is confusing as hell.

The advertisers are the reason why many of these jobs existed in the first place. Developers don't run off of hot air and exposure.

Then it’s probably just the time to fire all of them.

I work for an ad arb business. We don’t collect user-identifiable data and still make loads of money.

Your point of view would seem to justify child trafficking if that would pay the bills for most of the people in the industry.

> It's not about whether data abuse is okay or not, but rather it's about the consequences of taking such a heavy-handed approach as GDPR did.

It absolutely starts from "whether data abuse is okay or not". If data abuse is unacceptable, then the question is "what is the law currently doing to address that?" The industry had ample opportunity to self-regulate, but all we've received in breach after breach is long-delayed shallow apologies. The running joke is that Zuckerberg and FB have been on a 15-year "apology tour", giving hollow apologies for seemingly grave transgressions that other people warned about [1].

And given how tech unicorns like Uber treats fines [2], a heavy-handed approach seems to be the only way to actually curb the behavior in questions.

[1] EFF in 2009 warned that companies could take advantage of the leaky Facebook API, predicting the Cambridge Analytica situation 4 years in advance.

[2] In multiple jurisdictions that do not allow ride sharing, Uber has told drivers that they would pay the fines that drivers incur.

> Every news site I go to I get greeted by a pop up that won't go away until I interact with it.

Progress is not linear. Perhaps we'll have some AI soon to deal with that issue.

> Because it puts a whole bunch of people out of a job

Yup, that's the reason behind the hysteria.

> and ruins the user experience for many things.

Let's put the blame where it belongs. It's not GDPR that is ruining the experience. It's the sites that refuse to take a hint and stop abusing users' data. When you prepare this popup that will "ruin the user experience", you list a bunch of things in it. All of those are the things you should strongly consider stopping doing.

> And while this is happening I've read about people having their app revenue drop 90% in some cases.

Honestly, I was strongly hoping this would happen. Good to hear the new law is working.

> It's not about whether data abuse is okay or not, but rather it's about the consequences of taking such a heavy-handed approach as GDPR did.

As others said, the industry had plenty of time to avoid this. For instance, the Cookie Directive is a decade old now, with previous regulations touching this sphere as early as 16 years ago. The industry instead doubled down on user-hostile practices. So now we've got GDPR.

> ruins the user experience for many things. Every news site I go to I get greeted by a pop up that won't go away until I interact with it.

Clicking a few checkboxes is a very small price to pay for the benefits of improved data protection.

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