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Comment by jcmoscon | Hacker News Reader

That's what you do when you hate capitalism and hate the power to destroy it.

It's called regulators with teeth, and it's what makes the EU livable for its citizens. As an EU and US citizen this is exactly why I choose to live in the EU.

That's not how I'd put it, as a citizen of an EU country. The overregulation is suffocating for both business and individuals (who lived in socialism and value liberty, anyway).

Just this year, EU regulations destroyed my LTE data plans, hugely increased my cost of Swiss travel (the same) and ruined my hobby because terrorism.

It is sad that EU is slowly moving back towards the over-regulated and bureaucratic regimes of the past. This will further push the EU economy down the drain and prevent people from innovating. I just hope it does not lead to jail sentences and labor camps for people accidentally leaking the data as some in this thread are arguing for. The history does not provide much hope here unfortunately.

I don't see how this law benefits anybody except filling up the EU budget by collecting fines. The companies are already careful with their data as any leak would affect their image extremely negatively.

If one needs a good example of why Brexit happened, here it is.

It will prevent people from innovating in profiling, ad serving and keeping peoples data private. What a shame! Really wish the EU would see how great it is in the UK where they want to be able to access anything ever posted online, which can only lead to innovation of the highest caliber. /s

Do you think this law will prevent the government from accessing the data somehow? The way it's written it's primary goal seems to be extracting fees from successful business and not protecting user privacy. Ideally you would not want government intervention in these matters at all as you can bet it will end up with special provisions for government to have an access.

Maybe not, but they don't discourage/illegalize encryption and companies are supposed to delete your stuff on request.

Did you ever wonder why there are so few EU startups? Why the alternative to Gmail is Australian FastMail and nothing comparable even exists in EU?

Less sarcasm, more thinking. Shocking as it may be to you, even people you politicially disagree with may have a point or two.

There's so "few" of them because they're in a dozen different languages.

And they're not startups, just small businesses, the difference being mostly the funding. Investing a million for some people to burn through and say "yah, that didn't work" is very much unacceptable.

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