[JohnnyFlash]

My company is going to ignore the law until someone pull's us up on it. This law will severely restrict our ability to analyse how users are interacting with our product. This law will compromise our ability to further improve our product and disadvantage us against foreign competitors.

Our company doesn't track users off the site, we anonymise data so it cannot be tracked back to an individual... as far as we are concerned the law shouldn't apply to how we make use of cookies.

The fine is up to £500k. Realistically.. the fine for a small company is more likely to a few thousand. It would be better to pay a few k a month in fines than lose 90% of our user data. If we implement this we might as well stop developing our product.

[toyg]

I'm not disagreeing with you, but you might want to reword this post. The internet doesn't forget, and you never know when some old post might be used against you.

[JohnnyFlash]

I don't post any personal information with my JohnnyFlash alias. I like my privacy :)

Thanks for the warning though.

[tzs]

There's still a risk. Assuming you have done a good job of keeping your personal information away from "JohnnyFlash", no one will find your company through your posts here.

However, what about the other direction? Suppose your company comes to their attention through some other means, and they start investigating. At some point, you could find yourself answering questions under oath. It's conceivable the questioner might go on a fishing expedition, and ask "Have you ever posted on HN under the alias Johnny Flash?" (he might ask that at every company he investigates).

Then you've got the annoying choice between telling the truth and making your company's case for accidental violation much worse, or lying under oath which, if that is discovered, could bring serious penalties.

[wardenclyffe]

They are paying attention, one of the companies I deal with used to manage a lot of other companies, and their main website was listed for all these other companies.

Check out the analytics for 26th of May 2011:

http://imgur.com/5zXtE