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Comment by PierceJoy | Hacker News Reader

Do Americans complain about the GDPR? I’ve only ever seen them say they wish the US had something similar.

American businesses, especially in predatory industries like adtech, complain all the time.

I would hardly roll that up to all Americans though. Of course companies who's business model is seriously hurt by GDPR would complain.

Most Americans wouldn't even know what GDPR is, let alone have a reason to complain about it.

They are talking about Americans on this site, who very often work at companies that GDPR is made to stop predating on users. Many European users here also works at such companies, so you often see it from them as well, but not as often since those companies are mostly American.

Ah got it, I totally missed that context here somehow. I hadn't noticed a habit of Americans here complaining about GDPR, but that's interesting given another common pattern here of libertarian ideas. An American complaining about a different countries internal policies doesn't seem particularly libertarian.

Yes, mostly blaming them for cookie banners (which aren't because of the GDPR) but also because it makes them need to think about compliance.

"but the cookie banners look so bad and ugly!"

Well, that's kinda the point, but way too many website owners rather torture their users with barely compliant implementations than do what the GDPR intended: get rid of third parties.

> way too many website owners rather torture their users

including official EU websites

Which usually have an

[ACCEPT] [REJECT]

without any dark patterns whatsoever.

Also cookie banners are from the e-privacy directive, not the GDPR.

I'm positive informed consent doesn't require cookie banners, but the advertisers opted to make it as annoying as possible so that everyone would click "accept" just to be left alone. It could be a browser mechanism that only asks once for all sites and have a whitelist.

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