[eclipsetheworld]

As a European founder building startups since 2015, I’ve spent a massive chunk of my career navigating the "alphabet soup" of EU regulation: GDPR, DSA, DMA, AI Act, CSRD, SFDR, CBAM... the list is exhausting.

While the goals are usually noble, I’m increasingly convinced we’re regulating ourselves into irrelevance. I’m not a Big Tech company yet my interests align with theirs. We desperately need an EU that prioritizes actual growth over well-intentioned paperwork. To me, the AI Act and the GDPR are the worst offenders here, representing the largest possible gap between "good intentions" and the actual effect they have on the ground.

Consider frontier LLM labs. We have the talent, the Nordic data centers, and access to the GPUs. But why would any investor drop $100B on a frontier LLM lab here when the legislative environment is fundamentally more hostile than the US? It feels like we’ve already watched Mistral and Aleph Alpha get left in the dust.

To give you an idea of the "compliance vs. reality" GDPR gap: I worked on a project processing healthcare data for millions of people. We had a clear, easy-to-find privacy policy and a responsive DPO. Total GDPR requests for info or deletion? Exactly 53. Out of millions. We spent thousands of hours building systems for rights that only 0.001% of our users cared to use.

If you look at the courts, the "damage" being prevented is equally vague. Since EU courts don't really do punitive damages, most awards are tiny unless there’s actual identity theft. Most of what GDPR protects is "mental distress" or "loss of control"-concepts so ambiguous that courts rarely award anything for them unless something else went wrong.

The result of all this "protection"? No FAANG-equivalent, no frontier AI leader, and no homegrown ad-tech. It turns out the most perfectly regulated company is the one that never exists in the first place.

[loorke]

You're so right.

I cannot stand reading these comments left by people clearly detached from reality.

I used to work in a medical AI company myself, over the years we had a few requests for deletion, all from some crazy old German people. Moreover, we couldn't train our models on European data, which is absurd.

[array_key_first]

Medical data is a domain that requires extremely careful consideration of privacy and implications of what you're collecting. Most engineers work in highly regulated fields, except for software engineers, because they're not engineers.

If you can't handle the heat, get out of the kitchen. The big picture is that medical AI is scary stuff that can ruin countless lives if done even slightly wrong.

[soco]

So deletion of user accounts meant thousands of hours of development time?

[eclipsetheworld]

Thanks for the comment. It actually perfectly illustrates my point. Most people equate GDPR with a "Delete My Account" button, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

We didn't spend thousands of hours on a deletion feature (or just development time). We spent them in total to be compliant in a healthcare environment. That time goes into:

Documenting the entire lifecycle (how, why, and where) of every single data point we process. Conducting and documenting formal risk assessments for every major processing activity (Privacy Impact Assessments (DPIA)). Drafting and negotiating data processing agreements (DPAs) with every single partner and vendor we use. Building strict role-based access and logging systems to track exactly who views and edits data and why. Implementing pseudonymization and logical data separation to ensure we meet "privacy by design" standards. Constantly coordinating between the product and dev team and the DPO to update policies and communicate changes to users.

The point I’m making is that the EU has built an incredibly expensive regulatory environment to support rights that, in practice, the vast majority of users don't seem to care about. We’re over-engineering for a "loss of control" that the average user hasn't shown much interest in reclaiming.

[wizzwizz4]

Those things are all necessary anyway, apart from the last one (communicate to users) which absent GDPR is a nice-to-have. If you don't do them, or something equivalent to them, then your processes will be wrong and you'll have breaches – and breaches of healthcare data are extremely bad. What GDPR gives you is the assurance that you won't be at a competitive disadvantage for doing the bare minimum due diligence, because your competitors are required to do so, too.

> We spent thousands of hours building systems for rights that only 0.001% of our users cared to use.

GDPR does not require that any of the data subject rights are automated, other than "right to be informed" (which it doesn't explicitly spell out has to be automated, but "put the information on the website" is the easiest way to comply if you're relying on the consent basis for anything). If you expect that under 200 people are ever going to exercise a particular right, and automation will take longer than manually fulfilling those requests, then don't automate them: just add it to your DPO's job description.

> that, in practice, the vast majority of users don't seem to care about.

You can't use "people are choosing not to waste the time of a healthcare provider" as an argument that people don't care. They may simply be being kind. I very rarely require GDPR data subject access requests, but when I do, it's very important that I can get them in a timely manner.

If I know what information is kept by the organisation (and therefore would be included in the GDPR request), and there are other ways of me accessing the information I care about having, I don't need to perform a GDPR request. It's organisations where there aren't where I'm most likely to need to make a GDPR request. If a company is actually complying with data minimisation and purpose limitation, I do not need to make a GDPR deletion request. etc etc. I think you're focusing on how annoying it is for you, and not thinking of the impact on your less-ethical competitors (who might otherwise be able to run you out of business – depending on the industry).

[eclipsetheworld]

I think you’re conflating security with compliance.

If the goal is to stop breaches, we should mandate MFA and ban default-public cloud buckets. Those are technical solutions. GDPR, instead, mandates a massive administrative layer. No data breach has ever been stopped by a well-drafted Privacy Impact Assessment or a 50-page DPA. Those are legal shields, not security measures.

> then don't automate them: just add it to your DPO's job description.

The DPO isn't an engineer. To let them fulfill a request, I still have to build the internal tooling to query, redact, and export data from distributed production databases. Also, "I'll have my DPO do it manually" never sounds good when going through an audit.

> they may simply be being kind.

The simpler explanation is that the average person has no clue what these rights are because they’ve never had a reason to care. In healthcare, patients care that their data is secure and the service works. They aren't losing sleep over "data portability."

Ultimately, this "level playing field" only benefits incumbents. Unethical players ignore the rules until they’re caught, while legitimate startups are hit with a compliance tax that makes it nearly impossible to compete with US-based firms that can focus 100% of their energy on the product.

[soco]

To quote you, both unethical players and US-based firms can afford to ignore such rules. There must be a difference between these categories, right?

[wizzwizz4]

I have single-handedly stopped breaches-in-progress by going up to a company and saying "this practice of yours isn't GDPR-compliant: here's what you can do instead". I've heard from people who (self-admittedly) have no idea what they're doing, fixing breaches in their organisations that they didn't know about because, while they don't understand computer technology, they do understand their GDPR obligations. GDPR works.

> ban default-public cloud buckets

GDPR Article 5 1(f) already bans those. It doesn't mandate MFA in particular, but it does mandate "protection against unauthorised or unlawful processing […] using appropriate technical or organisational measures". There's a reason that GDPR doesn't get more specific than that. If you're at all familiar with the Microsoft stack, you'll know that mandated security checklists often come at the expense of actual security (see also: AViD's Rule of Usability). There's no real workaround for basic cybersecurity competence, at least at the moment.

> a well-drafted Privacy Impact Assessment

Are you saying you don't design your software systems before implementing them, nor document them before they go into production? It's the work of half an hour to reformat process documentation into a Privacy Impact Assessment report. And yes, as anyone who's worked on safety-critical infrastructure knows, process and documentation save lives. This is not burdensome.

> or a 50-page DPA

I don't think I've ever seen a DPA that long: they're usually under 10 pages, and boil down to "you are the controller, we are the processor, we're not responsible for the data, you're responsible for instructing us to fulfil any data subject requests, we won't fulfil them on our own, we won't peek at the data, here's how we're keeping the data safe". If your DPA is 50 pages long, then I'd warrant there's a bloody good reason for it to be that long. Are you saying you'd go into a complex business arrangement with a service provider without paperwork clearly setting out the expectations for each party to the contract?

(Note that Article 28 does not require the DPA to be a separate document: it's absolutely fine for it to be part of the main contract, so long as the necessary boxes are ticked. Afaik the phrase "data processing agreement" does not appear in the text of the GDPR. Splitting these contractual clauses out as a separate document is a decision made by companies for their own convenience – much like how programmers split programs up into libraries and modules.)

> The DPO isn't an engineer.

Let the DPO requisition an engineer. Running the appropriate queries against the database is a 2 minute job, so round up to half an hour. It's the way Stack Exchange did such things in their first few years of operation (admittedly, pre-GDPR, but that's besides the point). If the engineers are interrupted more than twice a week, then you can have one of them spend a couple of days throwing the tooling together to let the DPO field the requests alone.

> In healthcare, patients care that their data is secure and the service works. They aren't losing sleep over "data portability."

That's actually a major concern for anyone with complicated healthcare needs, who plans on moving to the catchment area of another practice. The amount of time wasted trying to persuade a new doctor that yes, I do need that medication, no I can't have the cheaper medication, I'm allergic — no, I do not want to "check" that I'm allergic, I nearly died the last time… no my prescription for this one needs to halve, not double, it's lower because I'm discontinuing it… all vastly simplified if they can just read up on your electronic health record, which data portability guarantees they're able to do.

[amarcheschi]

Another thing that was just recently examined (in this case by the french privacy authority) is the savings given by applying gdpr https://www.cnil.fr/en/economic-impact-gdpr-5-years

https://www.cnil.fr/en/economic-impact-gdpr-5-years

unfortunately the whole texts are in french

[loorke]

> Those things are all necessary anyway It's a bold statement. Have you ever actually been working on any compliance yourself? 80% of everything is just senseless bureaucracy. I've worked in a medical startup and we had it all: GDPR, HIPPA, FDA approvals etc. The requirements are completely detached from reality and are usually written for some X-Ray producing firms from 20th century, not an health-tech AI startup. And they're trying to regulate everything, even how your organizational structure should look like, how you should create tickets in Jira (or any other _compliant_ products). Developers had to take useless trainings on how a medical organization should operate, which were essentially the courses of Aesopian language of medical bureaucracy. And legal expenses, boy o boy, the company had to spend twice as much on compliance staff than it did on developers. And what was the result? Rich American competitors with a ton of VC money were getting approvals while our company was struggling with all this idiocy despite having a much more superior product.

[wizzwizz4]

I'm specifically criticising the claim that GDPR was among the most burdensome requirements. Very little of GDPR is additional to what you need to do anyway, apart from DSARs (which aren't burdensome: you may charge a fee if someone's abusing the process), appointing a DPO (optional for most organisations), and the third-country restrictions (which are partly necessary, and article 45 reduces the burden). I don't dispute that regulations can be silly and a waste of time (e.g. PCI compliance requiring the removal of effective security measures, as directed by incompetent auditors, because the legal requirement is "passes an audit"), but I do dispute the use of GDPR as an example.

I'll note that of the three regulatory acronyms you gave, two of them (HIPPA and FDA approvals) are American.

[loorke]

> two of them (HIPPA and FDA approvals) are American

I specified all three via comma to highlight that we had quite some history in compliance, in different jurisdictions.

HIPPA covers only medical devices, GDPR covers everything. FDA approval process is convoluted and expensive, especially for new types of devices, but it's still much easier than European MDR.

Also, I mentioned FDA because we didn't even try to get a proper compliance in the EU, because it's impossible for a startup without huge support.

[cess11]

I'd wager it's less expensive than US medical services.

[hodgesrm]

This is a great comment. At the same time GDPR and other standards do not address practical issues that (arguably) cause real harm like including features to generate undressed images of women and children.

It's the same dynamic that has warped the California housing market by adding a forest of regulations that make it almost impossible to build new housing. Those regulations for the most part add nothing but cost and time to projects. Meanwhile housing prices go through the roof.

[amarcheschi]

i'd argue that, at least in my european country, there already more severe laws regulating such thing that might earn you jail time, while gdpr wasn't made with that in mind

[hodgesrm]

The problem is enforcing those laws now the Trump administration is using X and other social networks as instruments of national policy and forcing others to use them, to the detriment (potentially considerable) of European societies.