Fucking sucks. Why bother gutting a law that's barely even enforced? Just bootlicking American tech giants for the sheer love of the game at this point.
this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2025
43 points (97.8% liked)
TechTakes
2287 readers
74 users here now
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
just had some onboarding training about the GDPR and I really don't get US "privacy activists" disdainful view of it. It puts the individual before corporations. Sad if it's atttempted to be gutted
From what I've seen, people dislike it because it's the reason we have, for example, those stupid cookie popups everywhere, or that some services simply refuse to operate in the EU so they don't have to comply, as if that were the GDPR's fault and not a symptom of corporations trying to get around the regulations.
The cookie popups are basically malicious compliance.
But many yanks (even geeks) have an instinctive dislike of anything that smacks of government regulation. They're conditioned to see corporations as good, or rather, that competition between corporations will always lead to good outcomes, and that anything that disrupts that competition as bad.
Tech bros are just the loudest, most financially successful branch of US geeks. Most of the geeks I know think GDPR is largely a good thing.
The biggest issue is that when launched, GDPR was taken up by a bunch of consulting companies who told you x, y, and z changes were necessary. Maybe half their advice was correct, but they made a whole lot of money telling you about it.
Repeat this story for SOX and PCI compliance. Both good things (although PCI compliance could mostly go away with some architectural changes to US payment processing), but some very undeserving contractors made bank off them.
There was a ton of panic here in Sweden too. Specifically I heard of entities like councils and public boards like unemployment who were braced for a ton of data deletion requests that had to be fixed within 24 hours or something like otherwise huge legal fees. AFAIK nothing like that happened.
ah the cookie pop-ups, the wretched cookie pop-ups (that have nothing to do with the gdpr, but the americans always know better).