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Comment by munchbunny | Hacker News Reader

I had to study up on GDPR for a past job, and after reading the full thing several times over combined with reading various people's interpretations of it, I came away feeling like it was a generally sane piece of legislation that was overall reasonable about the trade-offs and requirements it imposed.

Since then I've heard many people complaining about the effort required to deal with or work around GDPR constraints, including in one case a data scientist complaining about needing to get consent to use certain data sources for something that wasn't the product being sold to the user. Frankly, I was happy about it, because that's privacy working as expected.

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This has been exactly my experience. As a data scientist (not a lawyer!) I had to ensure that some of our existing data processing pipelines complied with GDPR (and make sure we could comply with its reporting requirements.)

I found the Articles well-structured, easily understandable, and overall plainly reasonable. In my experience, those who complained about the 'bureaucratic overhead' of making their pipeline compliant were those who were in charge of processes that clearly violated the spirit of the law, trying to press them into the letter of the law somehow.

I feel like there's a kinda silly trend towards the idea that regulation should never be burdensome, that something's wrong if compliance efforts are more onerous than annual training and automated enforcement. It comes from a good place - we do need to be cautious of regulatory capture through creating so many burdens that small companies can't afford to comply. But the loudest complaints always seem to be along the lines of "it's unfair that it's harder to do these things GDPR is trying to discourage".

As an American expat who has had to implement GDPR policies while working in Europe I know how it works I've read the damn thing. I'm back in the US and the amount of Americans who try to tell me about it, never having read the damn thing, drives me up the wall.

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