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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> There's no nuance here

This is your interpretation. Many prominent lawyers disagree.

In any case, convincing a regulator that you are not, in fact, collecting data could be harrowing, distracting and expensive. The risk of incurring those costs probably isn’t a smart one to take for a hacker or very early-stage start-up.

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> > There's no nuance here > This is your interpretation. Many prominent lawyers disagree.

I'd like to point out that it's in the interest of a proeminent lawyer to tell you that their services are needed...

So in this hypothetical scenario, for some reason the regulator looks at your website, which presumably has no personal information inputs, no tracking analytics etc. and which you have asserted collects no personal information, and they decide that you're still somehow collecting information, and for some reason hounding your low traffic website is the best use of their limited resources.

Taking that risk (of a regulator mis-interpreting something and needing clarifications, again and again, or worse, mis-interpreting something and getting hostile) across the EU’s twenty-eight members is a good one for Facebook. Probably not for a hobbyist.

What exactly is the risk to a hobbyist here?

Even if we assume a completely bizarre and pathologically incompetent regulator that somehow ends up zeroing in on some tiny website which exhibits no evidence of violation, the hobbyist might have to... delete their website?

> What exactly is the risk to a hobbyist here?

Have you ever responded to a regulatory enquiry?

If you have then perhaps you could share your experience more explicitly. It would be helpful to clarify your point of view.

So, we’re hoping bureaucray will save ourself from itself by its innefiency?

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