The full text of GDPR is 261 pages long with 99 articles and 173 recitals. Here's a condensed version and guide to reading the actual passages that matter, still 88 pages long: https://www.enterpriseready.io/gdpr/how-to-read-gdpr/#:~:tex...
And even if it was, being easy to read is not necessarily good when it comes to regulation, because this means there is a WIDE berth for interpretation by court cases and judges. This becomes a shifting target that makes compliance impossible.
For example, you could write a one sentence net-zero law that says "All economic activity in the EU must be net zero by tomorrow."
However, what constitutes economic activty? Is heating my home in the winter economic activity? What if I work from home? What about feeding my children food? What about suppliers and parts from outside the EU? Finished goods vs. raw materials? How will we audit the supply chains on each globally? Who will enforce those audits and how detailed do they need to be? Etc. etc.
To these questions, the religious green fanatics on EcoHackerNews will simply reply: it's actually super easy to comply, you can read it yourself, it's one sentence!
What you need to realize is that of course companies hate regulations. Every company, anywhere on Earth, will tell you regulation X is bad. All of them. They will do everything they can possibly do to not have the regulation.
When slavery was outlawed in the US, you can bet your ass that every single bad-faith recreation of slavery was tried. Many of them highly successful, and some taking over 100 years (yes, really!) to be fixed.
What that means is that, just because a company puts up a cookie banner, or says "this law sucks", doesn't mean you should take that to heart. Of course, to them, it sucks, and it's too complicated, and it's all legalese, and la dee da. They would prefer to hire children, okay? And we know that, for a fact, because they did. So just, grain of salt.
Doesn't mean the law is good either, but just know these are the adversarial forces here.
Have you missed all the large AI companies in US loudly demanding and otherwise lobbying for more regulation?
Regulations can be good for companies when you can make sure that they are written in a way that entrenches them against any new competitors.
It allows them to force startups to match their (slow) pace of development.
My feeling is that in 9 years you could read it.
However, I read most of the relevant bits in an afternoon. Most people on HN making preposterous claims about GDPR have never in their life read anything but industry's take on it.
> it's actually super easy to comply, you can read it yourself, it's one sentence!
It's trivial to comply with for the absolute vast majority of companies, you can very easily read it yourself, the bits that are relevant to most businesses shouldn't even take an hour to read.
My company had consultants come in to help with GDPR, I left after months of them being hired: more confused than I went in.
So I went to the source, and I found it surprisingly easy to read and quite clear.
I think theres a lot of bad faith discussion about the GDPR being complex by people who have a financial interest in people disliking it (or, parroting what someone else said).
Heres the full text: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE...
87 pages and nearly every edge case is carved out. Takes 20 minutes to read.
That's some serious speed reading! :-)
Or perhaps they also never read the law they are chiding others for not reading.
The text is 56k words, novella length but dry and tedious. This is hours of reading.
I’m not saying it’s unreasonable to read this document if your work involves GDPR compliance. But this is not a quick or easy read.
I’m not lying, why would I provide the source if I was?
You also didn’t read 56k words in 20 minutes. This is nonsense, at 46 words per second.
and yes it took 20 minutes, it’s not the dense legalese you’re implying.
it’s just not. unless the dense one here is not the text.
What I cannot believe is that you would in any way imagine that this is normal. Speed readers know that they read faster than other people and do not casually assume others could read The Hobbit in 34 minutes.
So no, I don’t actually believe you read this in 20 minutes, at >4 pages per minute, >46 words per second, and 10x faster than an average reader. Generously I would say you perhaps skimmed the doc in that time.
On the off chance that this is true, again congrats. You should know for the future that your experience reading does not map to the typical person who literally reads about 10x slower than you.
Jesus Christ, it’s like talking to a brick wall.
The amount of effort I’ve spent replying to you is more than was necessary to understand the entire fucking text.
Every statement is very clear what they’re saying, don’t record what you don’t need, how do you define what you need, make sure personal information can be deleted, what constitutes personal information.
It’s really really really fucking easy, like dude; you’re halfway through a sentence you know exactly what they’re getting at. You finish it anyway in case there’s an exception or something, and it’s never the case that there is.
Whatever… you believe whatever the fuck you wanna believe don’t call me a fucking liar though you cunt.
That the other replies to you said basically the same should clue you in that this is not realistic for others even if it were realistic for you.
> don’t call me a fucking liar though you cunt.
You could have easily just walked your claim back and said “Okay, 20 minutes is an exaggeration but it’s not a hard law to read”. Instead you repeatedly doubled down and backed yourself into a corner where the only possible options are that you are an ultra speed reader at 10x normal pace or you are a liar.
Not my problem if you don’t like those options.
Normally one tries to hire lawyers that have read the law and formed an opinion already…