Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

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With increased regulation, comes an increased barrier to entry.

I'm absolutely for protecting privacy, and I hate that companies like Facebook and Google peddle our personal details for profit. I worry that unless we are careful, however, that we'll wind up creating barriers to bootstrapping. I don't want EU-style cookie banners, required GDPR data export plumbing

I want privacy. But I also want an escape trajectory and ability to do thins on my own as a sole proprietorship or startup. I don't want to have to work at one of the big firms because they are the only ones that can pay for lawyers and auditing.

Maybe we scale regulation with the size of a business? That seems fairer than prohibiting small startups from getting off the ground.

Maybe barriers for personal information isn’t a bad thing? In order to store personal information, you should at least be competent enough to keep it safe. I don’t think having some kind of barrier is too much to ask for a company of any size to have to reach in order to show that they are competent to securely store the data.

I’m not saying the barrier should be great, but something (anything!) that makes keeping personal data secure a priority for a company is a good thing.

How many instances of this kind of lax security have we seen? Perhaps if there were a few extra hoops, then we’d not have seen as many.

What if it's a teenager's side project?

If a teenager has managed to gather personal data on 10000 people, including sensitive data, then they damn well should be able to protect it.

Do the 10,000 people who gave their information away to a teenager have no responsibility here?

What if a teenager wants to open a bank as a side project, say Monzo/N26 like?

What if those barriers kicked in at some number, e.g. 5,000 users. Once you are dealing with a big enough crowd, you better be able to protect that data, no matter who you are (imo).

I think that is way more sensible. It gives people the time to experiment and understand growth and the nature of their market. It also gives room to hobbyists, which is an important demographic of creatives that shouldn't be punished by regulation.

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