Yeah, I feel this is like saying that creating a better tax law killed innovation in the tax dodging space. The kind of innovation that the GDPR killed is nothing I miss.

Privacy used to be a right, but it's becoming seen as more of a duty.

You might not need their business, and the law should ensure you don't suffer by refusing it, but I'm not sure we should completely eliminate nonprivate tech.

Some things are inherently nonprivate because of P2P tech. Other things only deal with data that the users don't care about. Some things will probably make privacy advocates uncomfortable no matter what, like Tile and Sidewalk, and might be at risk depending on how far people go with this.

The GDPR is 99% great, but they could have had exceptions for small companies with a prominent "This service does not meet GDPR standards and your privacy is not protected on this site" disclaimer.

Most lost apps are probably utter shit full of viruses, but some may have left just because it was a hassle and they felt they might need a lawyer, and the 2 man dev team just scattered. They might not have been actually violating anyone's privacy.

Others might have been caught by the right to deletion thing, and not had the money to fix it, but nonetheless were not doing anything deceptive.

Of course, this is more theoretical, since most of the apps were probably literally a flashlight that mines bitcoin, or a dating app made by some porn app drop shipping company, with 8 total users(all fake), and a monthly fee to message a buggy bot.

Once you get big enough that people stop having free choice, and competition no longer applies, like with Facebook where you risk social exclusion, it makes sense to regulate it more.

I'd hate to see exceptions for the data portability stuff though. That was pretty much an unqualified win for everyone.

The "study" uses app revenue as a proxy for actual innovation, implying that the innovation they care about consists of GDPR-affected exploitation tricks that cannot be adequately inflicted. Highwaymen complaining about gun control.

Famous last words in a global economy, alongside "tax businesses and the elite". All three are a very delicate balancing act on the global scope of things, between letting the private sector run rampant or rapidly becoming a third world s#%t-hole by nuking your economy. More importantly, this isn't about privacy. This is about protecting information from foreign entities. If Facebook and Google were based in the EU and subject to their governments' control as well as order, I have serious doubts as to whether the GDPR would've ever come to exist. China and Baidu, for example.