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by olivierduval 2514 days ago
For me, it looks like the European GDPR - that received a lot of harsh words here, on HN - is a little bit improving the situation for everybody on the net, at least regarding the Big Players.

Maybe some regulations is not bad after all (at least for de facto monopolistic business like Google, Amazon & co)...? ;-)
2 comments
Cthulhu_ 2514 days ago
It's super effective and is making all companies pretty damn privacy conscious all of a sudden - except they also still violate it. The problem is that they will find ways to skirt around the edges of the GDPR as much as possible - or straight violate it in the hopes that nobody will find out.
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bad_user 2514 days ago
> "The problem is that they will find ways to skirt around the edges of the GDPR as much as possible"

Many companies like to believe that, however the GDPR is pretty strict in certain regards. And such companies continue to operate only because no data protection authority has targeted them yet.

There's also the matter that many US companies have ignored GDPR due to not having a legal entity in the EU, but unfortunately for them there are trade agreements in place between the US and the EU, which makes the GDPR enforceable for companies having EU users / customers, even without a legal entity in the EU.

Give it time. And send complaints to your local DPA about violations that you see, because it does help.

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cameronbrown 2514 days ago
Maybe it has, but I still believe in the long run it will do us more harm than good. We were starting to see a massive push to shift away from FAANG, but GDPR has just made those incumbents far stronger. They roadblocked the free market.
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passivepinetree 2514 days ago
Can you offer any sources for your assertions? In my observation, we were seeing the exact opposite of

> We were starting to see a massive push to shift away from FAANG

In my experience we were/still are seeing ever-greater consolidation towards Google/Facebook services. As an example, authentication/login with Google and Facebook is becoming the default on many web services, excluding users who may have deleted or never acquired such an account.

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cameronbrown 2514 days ago
Grassroots efforts everywhere, massive media pushes on the issue of privacy, monopolisation (still debatable imo) and ethics (Read: Amazon warehouse worker treatment), content creators shifting away from the ad model to donations (this could seriously damage YouTube in the long run), increasing use of adblockers, et al - these are just a few small things that really will set the wheels in motion against FAANG, though Apple and Microsoft are fairly safe because of their hardware business.

I don't think FAANG is going away anytime soon but the seeds are there. I'd rather these companies sort out their bad side than throw away all the work they've done.

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