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Comment by jonathanstrange | Hacker News Reader

Sorry but this line of "don't worry buddy, nobody cares about your small company" reasoning is dangerous. No reputable company wants to operate in a legal grey zone. Or do these directives and the corresponding laws explicitly only apply to large corporations?

Edit: I'm not complaining about the regulations in this comment, I'm saying that it's bad advice to ignore them just because you're a small business unless there is an exception for them. As it happens, exceptions for small business are planned.

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Any examples of indie devs burned by that danger? Don't do shady stuff and you will be fine and if you do shady stuff and push for edge cases and interpretation ambiguities to run your business then study the laws in details and lawyer up.

The basics are simple enough to run a legit business. There are some obvious and basic data protection requirements but I wouldn't call a gray zone unless pushing for it. Also, there's no EU police checking apps for violations etc. You don't just get sued the moment your app hits the App Store.

There is no legal grey zone. Just read the law. In Germany it's the BFSG (Barrierefreiheitsstärkungsgesetz) and it is much more pleasant than this monster of a word let's you assume.

It mainly boils down to: write ARIA tags and adhere to WCAG version 2.1 level AA.

I have no idea why you're replying to my comment, I wasn't insinuating that these regulations are hard to follow, I was replying to someone who suggested that small companies don't need to care about them because these laws are intended for large corporations only and won't be enforced on small business. IANAL but that's advice to operate in a legal grey zone and generally not recommended unless the respective laws explicitly make exceptions for small businesses - which they happen to make but OP failed to mention this.

I don’t know the exact wording, but from the GDPR and accessibility trainings I had to sit through at the enterprises I used to work at, I believe there is a certain size of company under which the regulations don’t apply. That was somewhere in the millions in revenue each year, so if you’re actually an indie-hacker, this should not apply to you. I’ll check if I can find a source for that claim though.

There are some parts of GDPR that are non-negotiable however, even for indie hackers. If you collect personally identifiable info, you NEED a privacy policy, a process for users to get their data deleted if they request it, for example.

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