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Comment by amenod | Hacker News Reader

> You could either stop using these services or ...

Are you serious? Have you tried not using their services? Try blocking Google Analytics, Tag Manager, ReCaptcha, fonts, gstatic,... What you will see is that you can no longer access much of the Internet. Want to participate in StackOverflow? Good luck if you block Google.

My beef is not with them trying to find my data when I'm on their site(s). They are however everywhere, on almost every site I visit. Coupled with their (impressive) technical provess it is beyond creepy, and there is simply no way one can avoid them.

I don't know what the solution is or will be, but as far as I'm concerned, this should be illegal.

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> Try blocking Google Analytics, Tag Manager

Blocking those two doesn't seem to break much, does it? I have uBlock Origin and/or Privacy Badger block them everywhere.

ReCaptcha on the other hand…

Just this week I needed it to complete the booking of an airline ticket and just now buying a high chair for my son. And today I've completed the blasted thing ten times in a row because of a game installer that was failing at a certain point (GTA V's Social Club thing); each attempt to figure out what was wrong meant completing the ReCaptcha again.

Fire hydrants, parking metres, pedestrian crossings, road signs, hills, chimneys, steps, cyclists, buses — that's what the internet looks like in 2019.

Unfortunately politically acceptable regulation only deters new ventures because it makes the costs of compliance too high.

The right vehicle for this is antitrust, but if you think you can sell that in this climate then I’ve got a great deal for you on the London Bridge.

The costs of compliance are not too high. Compliance is actually ridiculously easy for new companies: they need to collect only the data they need. That is all there is

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regu...

Yes. Your point? It’s actually ridiculously easy to be compliant with GDPR.

Edit: That is, ridiculously easy for new companies. Incumbents have been hoarding data for too long and it was actually harder for existing companies to become compliant.

If you don’t think that lawyer fees scale linearly with regulation complexity you’re either an early Uber employee or mistaken.

When you’ve built a social consumer business in Europe that is profitable after compliance, send me a term sheet.

I enjoyed reading what you said as a different perspective on the backend of ad technology vs privacy up until this comment thread.

I didn't build a profitable social consumer business in Europe after compliance, but I was part of a team that implemented compliance for a long existing company within the US due to them having clients and client's clients in Europe. They're profitable. Do you want my term sheet? Or are you weakly attempting to flex while complaining that people's basic right to privacy is preventing you from earning obscene amounts of money?

As I’ve mentioned I think elsewhere in the thread I left that business in no small part because it didn’t feel right to be in anymore. It was at a significant cost. I’m really lost on where in the thread I started to sound like a shill for business practices I (knowledgeably) don’t care for.

What do you estimate the implementation costs of GDPR are? I've seen some research that put the numbers in the 10's of billions IIRC

It feels like a regulatory moat for the big players who can afford it. Sorta like a complex VAT policy.

Those numbers are for existing companies who have been hoarding and selling user data with utter disregard to existing laws and user privacy.

If you do everything right from the start, the costs are minuscule.

Why would you need lawyer fees? How is GDPR complex?

It literally is:

- you only store data you require to run your business

- you delete data if customer requested deletion

- you give the customer their data if they ask for it

If your profitable business is built upon selling customer data wholesale to third parties, then good riddance.

Google and Facebook et al stores and processes PII on non-customers, without informed consent given from users.

It's still early days. We'll see what will happen when the DPA's and the courts have fielded a few high profile cases.

This! I hope it costs them dearly. I have never (willingly) given them consent to have my data, yet I know they have loads of it, just because other people I know are careless with data about me.

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