>I’m still not understanding the controversy and kickback around these regulations. The hysteria around GDPR has been silly.
Because it puts a whole bunch of people out of a job and ruins the user experience for many things. Every news site I go to I get greeted by a pop up that won't go away until I interact with it. Apparently similar things are happening with phone apps as well. And while this is happening I've read about people having their app revenue drop 90% in some cases.
We're not even a full week in yet, so we don't know what the full effects of this are going to be.
>It boggles my mind why people think that kind of behavior should be allowed.
It's not about whether data abuse is okay or not, but rather it's about the consequences of taking such a heavy-handed approach as GDPR did.
> Because it puts a whole bunch of people out of a job
Yup, that's the reason behind the hysteria.
> and ruins the user experience for many things.
Let's put the blame where it belongs. It's not GDPR that is ruining the experience. It's the sites that refuse to take a hint and stop abusing users' data. When you prepare this popup that will "ruin the user experience", you list a bunch of things in it. All of those are the things you should strongly consider stopping doing.
> And while this is happening I've read about people having their app revenue drop 90% in some cases.
Honestly, I was strongly hoping this would happen. Good to hear the new law is working.
> It's not about whether data abuse is okay or not, but rather it's about the consequences of taking such a heavy-handed approach as GDPR did.
As others said, the industry had plenty of time to avoid this. For instance, the Cookie Directive is a decade old now, with previous regulations touching this sphere as early as 16 years ago. The industry instead doubled down on user-hostile practices. So now we've got GDPR.
> It's not about whether data abuse is okay or not, but rather it's about the consequences of taking such a heavy-handed approach as GDPR did.
It absolutely starts from "whether data abuse is okay or not". If data abuse is unacceptable, then the question is "what is the law currently doing to address that?" The industry had ample opportunity to self-regulate, but all we've received in breach after breach is long-delayed shallow apologies. The running joke is that Zuckerberg and FB have been on a 15-year "apology tour", giving hollow apologies for seemingly grave transgressions that other people warned about [1].
And given how tech unicorns like Uber treats fines [2], a heavy-handed approach seems to be the only way to actually curb the behavior in questions.
[1] EFF in 2009 warned that companies could take advantage of the leaky Facebook API, predicting the Cambridge Analytica situation 4 years in advance.
[2] In multiple jurisdictions that do not allow ride sharing, Uber has told drivers that they would pay the fines that drivers incur.
> Because it puts a whole bunch of people out of a job and ruins the user experience for many things.
No, really, it is the advertisers who ruined the experience in the first place. And almost every site tries to make you agree to data collection without giving you another option, or hiding the other option under several menus. That's why I closed the TC page.
Because it puts a whole bunch of people out of a job and ruins the user experience for many things. Every news site I go to I get greeted by a pop up that won't go away until I interact with it. Apparently similar things are happening with phone apps as well. And while this is happening I've read about people having their app revenue drop 90% in some cases.
We're not even a full week in yet, so we don't know what the full effects of this are going to be.
>It boggles my mind why people think that kind of behavior should be allowed.
It's not about whether data abuse is okay or not, but rather it's about the consequences of taking such a heavy-handed approach as GDPR did.