I don't mean to sound trite or dismissive, but the blame should be directed at EU legislators.
If I create another software product I will explicitly and permanently make it unavailable to EU residents.
If I create another software product I will explicitly and permanently make it unavailable to EU residents.
While I'm a bit annoyed at the amount of paperwork and side systems that need to be constructed to ensure proper handling of personal data that I have had to implement, I can only see GDPR as something positive for the people.
My apps are tiny, free, and just not worth the hassle of figuring out what GDPR compliance is (even though they are likely GDPR compliant already since I don't store any info).
I think we're going to see a lot of small indie developers just not publish to the EU until it makes financial sense (which might be never). And that's exactly what happened here: Instapaper is a two-person team and they didn't have the time or resources to ensure compliance, so they just kept letting it slide.
I suspect we'll see much more of this to come for the EU.
Yes, GDPR may be beneficial and all, but thinking that it does not have an associated cost of a higher barrier to entry is a bit myopic.
And if your application doesn't store data, then it's a one time cost essentially. Which is the time spent reading up on the legislation.
How do I naturally during development acquire an Article 27 representative?
"Due to the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), we're currently unable to offer products and services to customers in the European Economic Community. We apologize for the inconvenience."
People have to be able to make informed decisions. It’s hard to tell from the outside if a restaurant is safe, so we have inspections. It’s impossible to tell if a website is trustworthy with your personal data, so we have laws to try and ensure they will be.
You really don’t understand this?
What I do give a damn about is not being able to read some quality publications that rationally decided GDPR is not worth the risk.
Not a week passes without such a reminder that I’m now living behind the Great EU Firewall. I now live in a place where I need to use a VPN to access all of the Internet, for crying out loud.
And that’s not to mention the click through acceptances of terms an every fucking site, that’s “only” annoying as hell (which nobody reads anymore and thus GDPR changed exactly nothing in it’s supposed goal).
EU’s bureaucratic zeal made, via GDPR, my life worse, with no benefit, even theoretical, for me. So please spare us the lecture on how GDPR is good for us. It’s terrible even for consumers.
If you don't respect your users' privacy you don't deserve to do business in the EU. And make no mistake: whether you like it or not, that legislation - or something very like it - is going to jump the Atlantic sooner or later, so why not position yourself ahead of the curve instead of stropping off and taking your ball home?
There are side-effects I don't like about GDPR, like the endless bombardment of overwrought cookie consents on every site I visit (definitely something that degrades the experience of the web), but I do like the fact that my privacy has to be respected by corporations.
GDPR is becoming that on steroids: the only thing that changed was for the worse: some sites outright banned EU visitors, the rest started using obnoxious terms screens that are even worse than cookie bars. Nothing really changed.
Anybody with half a brain could have seen this coming. But no, let’s double down on the same thing with GDPR. This time it will surely go down differently...
It doesn't have anything to do with GDPR, but it's a fantastic example of (likely) well-intended European privacy regulation both is utterly useless and also stands zero chance of jumping the Atlantic.
So you're going to make the decision of what constitutes "respecting my privacy" for every single person in the EU?
This is equivocating.
The issue is not whether you agree with having your privacy protected. The issue is deciding what constitutes "respecting privacy" for every single person in the EU, and threatening people with violence if they disagree.
That’s more than enough time.