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Comment by Jensson | Hacker News Reader

You got the ability to demand to see your data from every company and get it deleted, you didn't have that before. They could just keep whatever data they want and there is nothing you could do to discover or stop them from doing that.

If you care about privacy at all you should be very happy that is possible today. It is how we got all those articles showing what data Google and all other companies collects about you, since they asked about this referring to this EU law and the companies has to comply. So even if you don't use it yourself it greatly helps you anyway.

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I can see this useful for sites that collect a lot of data (Banks, Social Media, etc.) but for buying shoes from a shopify website, I really don't give a shit. If anything, GDPR has been a nuissance to me as a consumer. Being 100% honest. Cookier banners are so ubiquitious that we've all gotten used to just accepting them and moving on.

This is the problem with EU regulation. Good intentions, bad implementations and unforeseen consequences. In fact this goes so far into the reasons why EU cannot harbor a growing startup scene or make rockets. I am not against regulations but if you lay a landmind in front of every endeavor in the form of regulations, it bears down on people that want to disrupt existing and overweight companies that can afford to abide by regulations. I've talked to many Europeans and they resonate with the same sentiments.

I own a small business and I've gone through the process GDPR compliance. It is not too bad but there is a reason why there are upteen number of GDPR compliance consulting firms and checklist makers out there.

What should have happened is a complete solution to privacy in the browser instead of playing cat and mouse games with businesses that will find loop holes.

> Cookier banners are so ubiquitious that we've all gotten used to just accepting them and moving on.

Cookie banners has nothing to do with GDPR.

> I own a small business and I've gone through the process GDPR compliance. It is not too bad but there is a reason why there are upteen number of GDPR compliance consulting firms and checklist makers out there.

The reason is that GDPR compliance gets more expensive the more technical debt you have. For big enough companies with bad engineering practices it can costs hundreds of millions of dollars. For a small business with a straightforward product they likely are all but compliant without even trying.

> What should have happened is a complete solution to privacy in the browser instead of playing cat and mouse games with businesses that will find loop holes.

GDPR has nothing to do with browsers, it has to do with forcing companies to ask for and track data they keep on you no matter where it comes from. It applies to apps, to hiring interviews, to storing transaction data when you buy groceries etc. What you are talking about is a completely different issue.

I am sorry Jensson, but everything you said is wrong and misleading.

> The proliferation of such alerts was largely triggered by two different regulations in Europe: the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a sweeping data privacy law enacted in the European Union in May 2018; and the ePrivacy Directive, which was first passed in 2002 and then updated in 2009. They, and the cookie alerts that resulted, have plenty of good intentions. But they’re ineffectual.

https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/12/10/18656519/what-are-cook...

You are talking about the ePrivacy Directive, not GDPR. Cookie banners has been a thing for well over a decade.

What you probably meant is the user data banners/popups you have to click on that are new since GDPR. They are not cookie banners, they are a different thing, calling them cookie banners gives people the wrong impression.

The fact that you mix these two makes it look like you don't understand what you are talking about here. Especially since you talk as if this was the only thing GDPR changed. The cookie law is stupid, but GDPR is not.

>You got the ability to demand to see your data from every company and get it deleted, you didn't have that before.

This matters to the nerds on HN and Reddit,some clout chasers on Twitter, and no one else.

You couldn't be more wrong, so many people are afraid of stuff like their old Tinder profile leaking etc. So having a law that forces companies to delete your profile rather than keeping it around forever is really important to people. You can see leaks from another site like that embarrassing a lot of people who thought that they had deleted all data related to them, they certainly would have wanted GDPR back then.

People don't care about most data, you are right about that, but they care a ton about some data.

GDPR is just about that, make you own your own data rather than companies owning it. Companies has to ask for it rather than just taking it, and you can revoke that right at any moment and the company has to comply.

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