[existencebox]

Context: I'm currently responsible for GDPR compliance within a small corner of a Very Large Company.

I'm going to avoid making a statement about GDPR as a whole or about the OP, but I will say that I don't think large companies having an advantage at this phase is "bullshit."

One specific aspect of GDPR seems a good example of this. Third party data processors. If you use various third party products that provide tracking, testing, or other shims, you're responsible for ensuring export and delete of any PII associated data that flowed to those channels as well. Now, you can say the response is "if your partner doesn't have responsive channels, you have to pull the data" to make onesself compliant, but BigCos have the implicit advantage of being able to push the other direction, and get systems/functionality built into the third party product to allow them to be supported easier.

The amount of face to face time, support, and "deep touch" I can get with third party companies when compared to prior smaller corps is very apparent to me, and I'd be lying if I said it didn't make my task of ensuring GDPR compliance easier. Whether that translates to "more power", I don't know. But it's certainly an enabler.

[apahwa]

except BigCo also has tons of systems, autobackups, legacy code, and S3 buckets that's no one understands or has enough knowledge about. you know it's secure but you don't know what the downstream impact would be of making changes to those systems. so now you have to divert a ton of resources to figure things out - and no SWE in the company will willingly move to _that_ project.

while small companies don't have the big legal teams, they can just hire a consulting firm to go over it with them. they also have the benefit of being nimble, having smaller dependency trees, and typically using 3rd party tools which will generally implement this tooling anyways since their customers will likely need it. BigCo likely did a bunch of roll-your-own projects that have become black boxes over time.

[rdlecler1]

Just hire a consulting team? Yes, that’s the first thing you should do as you start a company in your basement with $0.