| I imagine it must feel like that. The reality is that engineers are blasé with data and have been since the personal computing revolution. Legal frameworks are incredibly irritating and often defined by people who know nothing about what they're regulating. This can lead to very bad laws. Given that we live in the real world and one can be sued for violating those laws, the stakes are quite high and low cost. Many states in the US allow individuals to bring suit based on these laws, meaning all that needs to happen is you make a mistake and some rando has time to hire a lawyer. And that is, by the way, notwithstanding the reality that many of the annoying compliance requirements are actually not all that annoying in principle, they are annoying to implement because many software development practices involve the free flow of data. Maybe that was fine when it was public blogs. But when it's someone's medical records or their financial data, or when it lands in the bucket of a Cambridge Analytica type, sorry, there's a higher burden. It is frustrating, I know. But we as engineers need to take responsibility for the consequences and stakes of what we're building. It's lack of that awareness that caused many of the largest controversies in our industry. |