[jlarocco]

It is kind of our own fault, though.

Judging by the sentiment on HN when GDPR was coming into effect, if something like it came up for a vote in the US, a lot of HN users and other tech people would vote against it.

There was no shortage of angry geeks posting articles about their service turning away EU users rather than complying with GDPR.

[Tsubasachan]

If you work in tech or marketing your salary comes from eroding privacy. There is a lot of money at stake here and people don't vote against their interests.

Europeans aren't inherently better: if Facebook and Google were companies founded in Germany or France who knows if GDPR would exist.

[icebraining]

Europeans aren't inherently better: if Facebook and Google were companies founded in Germany or France who knows if GDPR would exist.

The Data Protection Directive, which the GDPR merely extends and updates, is older than Google and almost as old as the web itself, and was an attempt to unify even older national laws regarding personal data. It's not a reaction to having "lost" the privacy-eroding race.

[andrei_says_]

European politicians don’t have to spend 70% of their time begging corporations for campaign donation. I believe this is much more of a determining factor.

[jlarocco]

I don't know if I'd say that. "Tech" is a really big field, and most areas don't have anything to do with eroding privacy.

Unfortunately, many areas that would have been "safe" years ago, like games and standalone applications, are moving in the direction of violating privacy by phoning home and sending "telemetry" data, but there's still a lot of areas that are good.

[crankylinuxuser]

I'm a sysad for a small company. We have an on-prem solution and a social media app.

We don't sell our data. We don't trade it. And we adhere to a fedramp medium (in spirit), even though the social media site wasn't checked for that.

Users have control over their profile, and we admins cant even read it (unless we read raw DB, and we dont). And deletion requests entail in zeroing out all user's data. The next day, zeroed data is then purged completely.

Seriously, companies can do this right. And I work for one that absolutely does this right.

[laumars]

Europe has had data protection laws long before Facebook and Google we’re a thing. The concept of GDPR wasn’t invented because the EU were angry at American companies; it exists because there is a need for it. Just as previous incarnations of data protection laws existed in the EU before the web was a thing too.

Also I resent being told that anyone who works in tech gets their salary from eroding peoples privacy. I can guarantee you that hasn’t been the case for any of the jobs I’ve had in my career.

[Zecar]

Hi I work for a printing company as a full-stack developer. My work involves things like writing API wrappers to ingest order flow so our customers can print brochures, or building web UI tools to create and order print resources. The last algorithm I wrote was to generate 5000 unique BINGO cards. Please explain to me how my salary comes from eroding privacy.

[divideby0829]

I think we can agree that what you do and what your salary "come from" can be distinct and can be influenced by other things. There are engineers at FB whose sole job is maintaining REACT.js but they are paid from the money made from selling data.

Further, and I want to make it clear that I don't mean this as a value statement, but is a printing company what most of us really think of a the "tech" industry? and by extension does that really make you the subject of what you are replying to?

[Zecar]

There is a huge amount of tech in the print industry, believe it or not

[thewarrior]

The demand from these mega companies and their pay keeps your pay high.

[Zecar]

No it doesn't. We don't sell to any tech companies. We do like, manuals for baby seats and stuff like that.

[thewarrior]

It does indirectly because their demand inflated demand for programmer talent.

The money they have to acquire companies raises the valuation of all startups.

I’m surprised most people don’t realize this.

[renholder]

>If you work in tech or marketing, your salary comes from eroding privacy.

Your own inherent weakness in morality doesn't implicitly infer that this is the inherent truth for everyone else in the tech or marketing industry. (Perhaps, moreso for tech than marketing but I digress.)

Not everyone in either industry is inherently on the "I'm just in it for the money" bandwagon.

[irrational]

I work in tech, but my and my companies work definitely doesn't involve eroding anyone's privacy.

[zaarn]

People living in Germany and France think differently, if Facebook had been invented there, there is IMO a good possibility it would be less privacy-invading.

That plus there are good historical reasons for our strong privacy laws.

[foobiekr]

Not all tech comes from slinging ads.

[thisisweirdok]

I would hope that those people would at this point realize that the upset about the GDPR was completely overblown?

[dylan604]

Were these people that actively work on projects that depend on this data for their business to remain viable?

[rock_hard]

This is a double edged sword...in the EU it doesn't matter because they didn't have a internet economy to begin with but here in the US a lot is at stake.

So if you want better privacy laws in the US then they have to be much more clever than GDPR to not destroy the economy and global competitiveness!

BTW: Personally I think it is possible to do better than GDPR here in the US.

[wahern]

As a percentage of GDP the so-called "digital economy" isn't much less in the EU than in the U.S. See, e.g., https://www.imf.org/~/media/Files/Publications/PP/2018/02281...

Excluding the U.K. and Ireland (tax haven) the difference between the EU and U.S. is greater, but (eyeballing) only on the order of 30-50%--e.g. ~4% vs ~6%.

What's more surprising is how small the share of GDP is the digital economy in the U.S.

That said, "digital economy" may be a poor proxy for understanding the impact of privacy regulations. It's a superset of tech industries, including much more than those parts which broker private information and to that extent would overestimate the impact. OTOH, I presume "digital economy" excludes large parts of non-tech industries (i.e. traditional sales and marketing companies, TV and newspaper ads, etc) and thus underestimates the potential impact.

[rock_hard]

I guess it depends on your definition of digital economy...I was referring to companies of the size and influence like Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Oracle, Airbnb, Tesla, SpaceX, etc