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Comment by Theodores | Hacker News Reader

The whole thing was a shambles, there was no reference design that you could just implement for your ecommerce store/blog/software service or anything else that required it.

Instead we had people running around like headless chickens rushing to put in place some extra tick-box on their website.

The funny thing was how people sent out those emails to their newsletter subscribers and I do wonder how decimated those lists became. People got GDPR fatigue and could not be bothered with the emails after a while. This particularly affected smaller businesses who had legitimate reasons to email customers.

Does anyone here have any anecdotal data on how badly some of these email lists were purged?

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As I mentioned in another thread, the biggest winners from this entire GDPR saga are Google and Facebook.

Email is control. You get someone's email once, you get to control how often you contact them. You can send them hundreds of messages for next to no cost - as long as they don't hit 'unsubscribe'

But if you can't rely on email, what do you turn to? Ads, of course!

I get that there are some nasty actors that abuse your privacy. But as a consumer, I've never felt that spam was that big an issue to begin with, at least not big enough to warrant small businesses ceding control and having to rely on Google and Facebook to reach their audiences.

> The funny thing was how people sent out those emails to their newsletter subscribers and I do wonder how decimated those lists became. People got GDPR fatigue and could not be bothered with the emails after a while. This particularly affected smaller businesses who had legitimate reasons to email customers.

We've had data protection laws for 20 years. Those companies were already breaking the law if they didn't have permission to send email, and if they had a legitimate need to send email they don't need consent under GDPR.

Irony is that I never got that email from Facebook and Google. Only small websites bothered to try and obtain an agreement.

As I understand it, people had to only gain consent for email lists if they had never gained consent previously.

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