The tone of this article makes it sound like it's a bad thing that Facebook and Google won't be much affected by this law, but I don't really think it is.
The reason the big players aren't much affected is that they've already had to make huge privacy changes in response to GDPR. They've already paid those costs.
A lot of what you see about privacy is uninformed fear mongering. This article is a good example: it seems to take it as a given that anything that doesn't substantially increase privacy protections is a bad thing, but no reasons are given, and the costs aren't weighed. In reality there's a balance to be had here and we need to be looking at both sides. I'm not saying there's nothing to fear, just that there's a real disconnect between what the media's afraid of and what we should actually fear, and there's a very real danger of legislative changes doing more harm than good.
GDPR actually provides some pretty substantial privacy guarantees and I think we should wait to see the effects of GDPR play out before we go fiddling with the system more.
The reason the big players aren't much affected is that they've already had to make huge privacy changes in response to GDPR. They've already paid those costs.
A lot of what you see about privacy is uninformed fear mongering. This article is a good example: it seems to take it as a given that anything that doesn't substantially increase privacy protections is a bad thing, but no reasons are given, and the costs aren't weighed. In reality there's a balance to be had here and we need to be looking at both sides. I'm not saying there's nothing to fear, just that there's a real disconnect between what the media's afraid of and what we should actually fear, and there's a very real danger of legislative changes doing more harm than good.
GDPR actually provides some pretty substantial privacy guarantees and I think we should wait to see the effects of GDPR play out before we go fiddling with the system more.