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Comment by holidayacct | Hacker News Reader

It's not that simple, some of these companies have tech stacks that are run-a-way trains written by people who had good intentions but wrote their code and built their infrastructure in a way that was meant for 1/50th of the traffic they currently have. I don't know anything about instagram's infrastructure but what I can tell you for certain is that every one of these companies has legacy infrastructure and code that keeps them from being able to meet all legal requirements. You can't just make a blanket statement that they don't have an excuse.

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> I don't know anything about instagram's infrastructure but what I can tell you for certain is that every one of these companies has legacy infrastructure

So you don't know anything about Instagram but at the same time know for certain that they have legacy infrastructure that keeps them from meeting legal requirements? How about we don't give them a pass just because it requires a bit of work to comply with laws and regulations.

Maybe its just me but I have yet to work for a company that didnt have legacy infrastructure that was hold them back in some way. Even the startups I've worked for had to make odd business decisions in order to take on new customers. Those odd one-offs and business decisions eventually led to sprawling legacy infrastructure. If there is an infrastructure Utopia I have yet to work there or hear of it.

If they don't want to comply with laws then they shouldn't be operating.

Then they have to stop adding new features, and focus their countless developers on implementing a way to meet these legal requirements.

And the fines for not doing that need to be big enough to motivate them to do that.

These companies are shipping new features every day. If they have the bandwidth to work on those projects then the failure to meet legal requirements is an issue of prioritization, leaving no excuse.

That really isn't the user's problem.

Laws and rules need to be followed no matter what.

It's the same with GDPR.

And this is the attitude that causes businesses to tell lies about everything they are doing. If you want transparency with regard to how you're data is being handled you need to ease up a bit and realize there are biological limitations to how fast people can make changes. Most of these companies have people who want to fix these problems. They just have hurdles you don't know about, some of them are internal politics and others are technical.

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