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Comment by l5870uoo9y | Hacker News Reader

I haven't spoken to a single technical person in Europe who doesn't despise the GDPR. It is only praised by the Eurocrats themselves or the whole pack of NGOs/think tanks who lives off EU funding. As a guy with a startup I naturally fear this will be as counterproductive as GDPR or the decades of lawsuits against various foreign tech corporations. The fundamental problem is however with the political class.

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> I haven't spoken to a single technical person in Europe who doesn't despise the GDPR

Then I suspect you haven't spoken to anyone technical. Every single person in my company on the dev team (myself included) is extremely pro GDPR, not the least because it provides us safety from leeches that would try to impose some horrid user-violating tracking in the app we make.

The greedy suit wants us to track every millimeter of the user's mouse on the page? Nope, thanks, better luck next time!

> As a guy with a startup...

If your startup can't exist without hoovering infinite user data in perpetuity, then your startup shouldn't exist.

The problem is that many European startups don't exist because potential founders don't want to have to deal with GDPR when they could focus on building a good product first.

And yes, tracking what users focus on is very relevant to building a good product. But that kind of entrepreneurial mindset is largely absent in Europe - my guess is most Europeans with such a mindset eventually go to America, whether they were born in 1850 or 1985.

> ...when they could focus on building a good product first

So not tracking every single molecule of detail about your users is incompatible with building a good product?

If being entrepreneurial means that I have to violate my user's privacy then I'd rather not be an entrepreneur, thanks. And again, if your business can't survive without being invasive and malicious to your users, then your business shouldn't exist. You won't see me or anyone else reasonable weeping about the dissolution of such entities, either.

If you’re building B2B software, It’s not that you can’t track but rather that you need to spend time building data retention infrastructure before customers would even consider trialing your solution.

There are no shortage of European startups and GDPR is really doesn’t prohibit a startup…unless your business model is trading personal data. And if it is, then you deserve to be regulated.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16954306

One press announcement from 5 years ago isn’t proof. Companies shutdown all the time and cite reasons beyond “our business model just wasn’t profitable”. Many other companies are just Trojan horses for data harvesting — and if those get shut down then good riddance because they’re exactly who GDPR was intended to protect us from.

If GDPR was really that problematic then it would be all over the news instead of a few nationalists outside of EU arguing about hypotheticals on random message boards.

If your product requires selling user data then maybe its not so good of a product.

GDPR doesnt prohibit you from monitoring your product. It just gets very serious when you abuse users without them agreeing.

Like Threads not launching in EU because of that.

I agree. I just wish there would be a browser setting where you could say "only ever functional cookies" and never see a cookie banner again. But I guess that would need to be forced on companies via another legislation. The free marked doesn't do such a user friendly thing.

Consent-o-matic does that https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-mat...

I want it to be standardized and guaranteed that it works with every website and every browsers. E.g. if something like the `DNT: 1` header is set don't even show me a consent banner, only give me functional cookies. And a law that requires websites to do that. Then there is no need for an add-on that constantly has to play cat and mouse with all websites and that only is available for certain browsers.

> I haven't spoken to a single technical person in Europe who doesn't despise the GDPR.

I'd like to know those people, especially if their job is connected in any way to the practices the GDPR is fighting against, because, although it may have been created better, I can't find a single reason why ordinary honest people should believe the GDPR shouldn't exist.

I am a technical person living in EU and I approve GDPR wholeheartedly. Many of my colleagues are also approve the law to full extent.

Adding a few more data points here, my colleagues and friends (all of us technical people), approve of GDPR.

I am a technical person living in EU and changed my mind about GDPR and the upcoming laws like AI Act and CRA, now thinking it is embarrassingly stupid trying to achieve any means of personal privacy that way.

Let alone Mozilla (non-EU) and browser extensions (like ublock) did more for personal privacy than any of the aforementioned laws. And in contrast to creating a "level playing field with Big Tech" they made tech business in the EU a morass of legal insecurities for small businesses while big corps are still happily intruding individual's privacy in ways that our current legal system cannot even cover.

How so? GDPR has done so much for personal privacy, I can't see why you would think it's stupid. It's been a pain to implement when it was introduced, sure, but since then it's pretty much become routine and privacy has become a key value of nearly all (EU) tech companies.

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