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> One of the goals of this law and similar efforts is to make it clear that you need to consider the social, ethical, and legal ramifications of the things you create.

One often wonders whether lawmakers heed their own advice here with what they create.

In the US, I've always found it humorous that there is no legal penalty for lawmakers continually and knowingly violating the constitution. The worst that happens is they get their bill struck down in court, then their state's legislature can vote in the next law.

How about 3 strikes for politicians. They do their job poorly, they lose it, regardless of their election status.

There is no agreed upon measurement of job performance that transcends the partisan divide.

Well, as a german, where this happens often enough: If a law gets truck down by the Federal Constitutional Court ("Bundesverfassungsgericht") as being in violation of the constitution, this universally can be seen as a bad job performance for the lawmakers. They know the law was in violation of the constitution, still they agreed upon it. It's their fucking job to make sure laws are not in violation of the constitution. This clearly justifies a strike.

> It's their fucking job to make sure laws are not in violation of the constitution.

Well, not really: That's the constitutional court's job.

Is that really true? I'd expect there to be cost associated with shitty law. Uncertainty and frequent changes shouldn't be in the interest of anyone but those whishing for extremes. Thus i'd hope for companies to support politicians who's legislature achievements will last. I'd hope, but am of cause not sure this can overcome those seeking short term benefits and political tribal blood sport thanks to the shitty US two party voting system.

Research shows people support of basic different options like more generous or stricter welfare programs change based just on which party they were told supported which option (chosen randomly by the researchers). In the face of that it's hard to believe that people particularly care about deeper things like that.

> [...] You are not creating neutral things in a vacuum; there is no neutral ground in a burning world[1]. That "small thing on the internet" might be reuniting families that were separated by work or politics, or it might be undermining the support structures of an entire industry or community [...]

Your points are well argued - especially regarding the ethical and social implications of what we create, and I agree with them, however we have differing definitions of "small" in this context.

Your arguments apply to things that are maturing and are reasonably big already, but big things have small beginnings... and the internet/web is a fantastic place for nurturing those very very small ideas for basically free, this law appears to threaten those small ideas.

It’s safe to say people create hobby projects that fit within their ethical framework. This is about forcing a very slanted set of ethics on pretty much every creator.

I personally find regulation like this abhorrent and against my morals. Sadly I don’t have the money to fight the EU so my creations will be blocked to its citizens going forward.

The end result of this is that EU citizens will be the ones that suffer from lack of access to technology and the smart ones will end up VPNing into non-EU networks to stay on the cutting edge.

> The end result of this is that EU citizens will be the ones that suffer from lack of access to technology and the smart ones will end up VPNing into non-EU networks to stay on the cutting edge.

Right, because everyone who lives in Europe is too incapable of coming up with technology and businesses themselves (that have the added benefit of being GDPR compliant) and without access to American firms they will surely fall into a technological dark dark age.

Instead of viewing GDPR as some nightmarish spectre coming to ruin everything, why not think of it as a potential opportunity? You're familiar with making money in a borderline no-holds-barred approach, now try and come up with some innovative business ideas that _don't_ rely on scraping and selling as much data as mechanically possible to prop up a business. This is a great for the disruption hackernews loves so much.

> Right, because everyone who lives in Europe is too incapable of coming up with technology and businesses themselves (that have the added benefit of being GDPR compliant) and without access to American firms they will surely fall into a technological dark dark age.

Cite one EU startup that you’ll miss if the issue was reversed.

Spotify.

Nokia and Skype we're both from Europe as well IIRC

Spotify, CityMapper, Revolut, and while technically not a startup, I think OpenStreetMap should count as well.

> Instead of viewing GDPR as some nightmarish spectre coming to ruin everything, why not think of it as a potential opportunity?

That's the best way to think about it. When the EU started imposing VAT taxes on non-EU companies on internet sales to EU customers, a bunch of businesses sprouted to handle all of that accounting for you. (So instead of me selling my software online directly, technically all of my EU customers now buy from a US company called FastSpring instead. Fastspring remits VAT on EU sales for me so I don't have to deal with EU tax law, just my own Australian tax law.)

There's probably similar opportunity for a GDPR service that stores customer data via API service, that shields small / micro businesses from all the GDPR compliance. (Eg all your personal Wordpress blog comments are actually stored, hosted and served by a service that handles GDPR modal-consent forms and deletion requests on your behalf.)

>... now try and come up with some innovative business ideas that _don't_ rely on scraping and selling as much data as mechanically possible...

The problem is a lot of us who would never scrape or sell data and have no interest in exploiting our customers, are still worried about not being GDPR compliant, and the EU choosing to pursue us an example for something that none of our customers actually care about.

> The problem is a lot of us who would never scrape or sell data and have no interest in exploiting our customers, are still worried about not being GDPR compliant, and the EU choosing to pursue us an example for something that none of our customers actually care about.

Why would you be worried about being pursued as an example? Is there any data that supports this as a reasonable fear? Isn't this exactly the "GDPR is a nightmarish spectre that can destroy anyone at any time" mentality?

I’m just confused by your view.

This is a relatively simple regulation that basically required anybody processing user data to do so responsibly. How does one have an ethical objection to that?

Define anybody. Define user data. Define responsibly.

The GDPR does exactly that.

Please read about the GDPR, where this is all explained in far better detail than I will be able to.

Alternatively, hire a lawyer, like you would for any other regulatory requirement.

> in far better detail than I will be able to.

Far better details? It gives vague info on what might be considered personal data... I would not call it very detailed. In most cases just says personally identifiable information.

Why do you equate cutting edge with unlimited unregulated collection and processing of personal data?