Comment by ivan_gammel

This all is a reflection of the old talks about the costs of doing technical things right. One way of looking at them is that if something works for business, we should not pursue better software architecture or improve security or usability. Another way is to analyze and estimate the technical debt and eventually start paying it. This is exactly what happens with privacy now: business may cry about "removed incentives", "prohibiting costs", "eliminated opportunities" and other BS, but in the end it's just a compliance debt that they are not willing to pay. GDPR identified that debt and the mechanisms for claiming it, that's it. After the dust settles, there will be plenty of best practices and educated people which will make compliance easy, certain business models unpractical and the business will go as usual. Yes, compliance isn't a piece of cake, but there's nothing written in that law which a sane engineer or manager would not implement. Even the right to be forgotten makes sense: information about past crimes distributed via search is a kind of extrajudicial punishment which makes it much harder for people who already served their sentence to find a job and return to normal life. It's a job of a government to prevent them from committing another crime, it's not a job of a search engine or a news website.