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Comment by jcriddle4 | Hacker News Reader

Yes you are correct. What are the costs compared to the benefits? Is the additional privacy going to be worth it? If we discover a few years from now that European companies are sharing roughly the same amount of data with other companies as their American counterparts, just documenting it better, have you gained anything?

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Yes, because I can request it and ask for deletion.

Are you willing to pay more for products and services? Because ultimately you will.

If hiring one person changes the calculus that much, it's nonetheless easy to afford if profitable companies paid their workers more instead of sending it to shareholders or doing stock buybacks. The proportion of wealth held by the managerial class exceeds the Roman Empire at its height. https://persquaremile.com/2011/12/16/income-inequality-in-th... For reference, the gini coefficient of the united states in 2016 was 0.48. Rome at its population peak was between 0.42-0.44 according to the article. A gini coefficient of 0 is a perfectly equal society and a coefficient of 1 is perfectly unequal.

Small startups also often get the benefit of reduced regulatory burden, which is fitting because they have less overall impact on society. Once they become large, it is fitting that they play by rules that benefit the majority.

How is a gini coefficient relevant to higher priced products due to regulatory overhead?

It seems you have an axe to grind and derailed the conversion to compare the US with ancient Rome. Please provide a citation showing a correlation between increased privacy regulations and reduced gini coefficients.

I was responding to the claim that increased privacy would lead to possibly unacceptable price increases. I accept as axiomatic that increased privacy reduces profits, because, for one, you can't sell data that is private let alone the regulatory burden. My position is that these vociferous critiques of even minor bequests to the public are ill founded.

You already are paying with your privacy. If you value it for $0 then you're going to pay more...

Yes, yes I am.

Another legitimate question is: is the fact that you are willing to pay more a good enough reason to force me to pay more? What if I don't care about privacy as much as you?

That's the real issue here. You can either decide that privacy is a basic right that everyone has and cannot be negotiated away, in which case this law makes sense.

Or you can decide that it's a decision each person makes, and let the market take care of providing options that are more vs. less privacy-respecting.

> You can either decide that privacy is a basic right that everyone has and cannot be negotiated away, in which case this law makes sense.

> Or you can decide that it's a decision each person makes, and let the market take care of providing options that are more vs. less privacy-respecting.

Or, collectively, a group of people can agree on a government that supports privacy protection for goods sold under its remit. Which is what's happened here. I get that it's not popular in the US, but privacy controls are quite popular in Europe, and the EU is in this case following the mood of its people.

Yes, "a group of people" acting through the government to support privacy protection is what my first sentence meant. Clearly that's what's happened.

Not sure why you phrase it "or"? I think we agree that that's one sensible approach to take (treating it as a basic right that can't be negotiated away, much like other things).

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