The entire adtech business is due for correction.

It's strange that you think the business models are going to fly in Asia. China and many Asian countries are laying out privacy regimes that are even more strict than the GDPR. Take a look at China [1] or Thailand [2]. Pretty soon it will be the case only in America that adtech companies can collect and sell endless personal information without consequence.

[2] https://www.bangkokpost.com/business/news/1455534/new-data-l...

What are you talking about? China with it's national real-time citizen tracking using 'social credit' scores, facial recognition, and internet firewalls really cares about your privacy?

Ok, spend all your time going after the ad company and ignore the government which is 1000x worse and will control your life or toss you in a cell. Good luck with that.

He's not ignoring that? He's pointing out the laws are stricter when dealing with private companies. You are talking about two completely orthogonal laws or standards.

It's connected to their other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17158209

The laws are not stricter (they arent even laws yet), and they are meaningless in those areas because the government itself already defies them.

>they are meaningless in those areas because the government itself already defies them.

That doesn't make laws meaningless.

In this more specific case, it's very difficult to judge China's policies with an even tilt because private Chinese companies are ad hoc lifted to "public status" when they're convenient for the government to leverage.

But China grants legal exemptions without especially good or consistent oversight over those countries. The net result is an awful lot of folks who get a legal exemption for a specific aspect of their business and then tend to run roughshod in other less scrutinized areas.

>very difficult to judge China's policies with an even tilt because private Chinese companies are ad hoc lifted to "public status" when they're convenient for the government to leverage.

How is this different from any other western government?

Having worked at a high profile government contractor, my observation is that you don't get the same kind of leverage other folks report. Also, the bidding process is cuthroat and subject to public scrutiny here.

Now if you're taking about security contractors, that's different and the same the whole world over I guess.

First of all "insignificant" is far fetched. Small? Yes. But not insignificant.

Second... I don't see how valuation matters. Did they loose money? Went out of business? No. VW lost valuation during the whole diesel gate scandal. Did that make VW a less relevant? No.

And the last thing that I wanted to mention: I said "this is just an implementation of an old French law into the European Level". And I was mentioning the French law itself, not the European Law.

The cookie issue that you're mentioning is related to the ePrivacy directive, which is solely European Law, that was passed one or two years before the whole lost of valuation. My point was just that the GDPR doesn't affect anybody.

> I don't see how valuation matters. Did they loose money?

Do you know that they are a publicly traded company? Losing money is exactly what happens when the stock price falls. When you lose more than half of your value, going out of business is a serious risk.

The stock price usually reflect the "feeling" of the investors. But it does not make a company loose/win money. It's just what the investors think the company will make in the future, but investors (as often) can be wrong.

It only affects the ability to make more money by issuing new shares.

But the "bank account" of the company doesn't get divided by two. Customers don't start paying only half the price for their service.