[AnthonyMouse]

> We don't give special provisions to start ups writing safety critical code or developing new health care technology, why would this be any different?

Safety critical code and health care technology are life and death situations.

It's also important to understand that the regulations in those sectors have destroyed (or deterred) an incredibly large number of startups, and the net lives saved as a result is quite likely negative because the value of life-saving technological advances generally exceeds the cost of mistakes in developing them.

People have severe emotional reactions to this. A doctor's experiment may kill fifty already-terminal patients but uncover a cure that goes on to save five million. But the families of the fifty dead patients can blame a specific person for their deaths while the five million aren't even aware what they lost, so the regulations are biased against progress.

This is obviously not a good template for making decisions in other industries where emotions don't run so high.

[chc]

People's personal info can be a matter of life or death too. If yours isn't, you can count yourself fortunate.

[AnthonyMouse]

> People's personal info can be a matter of life or death too.

That's the point. If we pass regulations that result in continued and increased centralization because only large organizations can afford compliance, that is not advantage to the people whose lives are at risk.

If you're a homosexual in Russia or a democracy activist in China or an advocate for womens' education in parts of the middle east or a Jew in WWII Germany, "privacy laws" can't save you. A company's fear of the state can't protect anyone from a corrupt state. But structural and technological privacy protections might. Which are the things hamfisted regulations inhibit.

Debian is better at this than AT&T.

[richardwhiuk]

That's a very optimistic view.

It's fairly clear that giving away people's data without any care is unsafe.