[jtanderson]

I totally agree. You should definitely be able to A/B test features, for instance, but if that's the point where the business is, you can run focus groups and do similar studies without running up against these regulations. My point is just that the business may need to succeed to some level before these regulations really become an issue. An analogous situation may be a small business being burdened by complex tax laws, but not until they acquire sufficiently sophisticated internal structure and revenue streams.

My point is that this can be factored into the growth of the company, rather than seen strictly as a barrier to entry, as suggested by the comment above. Are there really fresh startups that really need to worry about this kind of data gathering out of the gate? I'm imagining they're going to be spending a lot more time engineering features and interfacing with important clients to get data to improve their product directly. I often see business/marketing folks wanting user data for what amounts to very premature optimization.