Nobody disagrees with GDPR's intent. The qualm is with its administrative approach. If someone said "write a bailout for lawyers and lobbyists," it would look like GDPR.
Taking your analogy, a good law would assess a fine for dumping. A bad law would (a) require continuous certification that one is not dumping and (b) allow anyone to prompt an expensive inspection (done via writing letter responses to a regulator, not on-site inspection by an expert) by reporting you to one of twenty-eight national regulators, each of which have jurisdiction over you.
The former imposes a fixed costs, regardless of compliance. That benefits incumbents. The latter promotes venue shopping, a further advantage to size and incumbency.
Note that the European consumer protection laws already allow consumers to sue in their own country. So if you do business in all EU country, you can be sued in lots of places.
Maybe if you are continuously worried about regulators, then it is better to not start a business. In the real world, regulators are busy enough. Regulators are not going to bother random companies in other countries just for the fun of it.
Yeah sure, all that privacy, who needs it anyway?
/s
Who would have thought that legislators had something to gain from a proposal they push?
The worst I've heard of was the abuse of millions of people's data by Cambridge Analytics to mess with an election, but maybe that's just a little icky too?
Without targeted advertising there is much less financial incentive to collect data so the surveillance state won't get help from corporations.
I'm working on GDPR right now at my company, and it's not a small effort.
None. Do not target the EU initially, start in the US market with your MVP. It's by far the most liberal major market to do an MVP in, in all regards. It's the world's largest economy and easily accessible; plus you essentially get Canada as a bonus: a combined $21.5 trillion in economy. Entirely disregard GDPR until you've scaled the business enough to afford whatever you've calculated GDPR compliance will cost you in terms of effort / resources, then push into the EU when it's convenient.
Enforcement and jurisdiction have yet to be tested yet, of course, but it isn't as simple as "don't set up shop in the EU".
It also doesn't matter what China purports I should do with their citizen data, or South Africa, or Australia, or Brazil: their wishes don't overrule the supremacy of US law inside the US. If China wants me to delete everything on my service about Tiananmen Square, or an anti-China activist, guess what, that's not going to happen for the exact same reason. I'm also not subject to the UK government's enforced media blackout on the Tommy Robinson arrest: they too can piss off.
If a EU citizen signs up with my US based service, their data will be governed by US law.
It is that simple. It will remain that simple. The US isn't going to cede its sovereignty to the EU: it's drastically more powerful than the EU in every regard. There is no scenario where the US lays back and allows the EU to legislate how the domestic US economy operates in such large ways.
The only likely outcome is that the US comes up with its own new privacy rules in the next few years, which will be different - more lenient - than GDPR. If you want to operate in the two markets, you'll have to comply with each approach accordingly.
It's not a thesis, it's proven, court established rule of law with more than a century of built-up precedence establishing how things actually work when it comes to US sovereignty. This is all quite laughable.
It's identical to saying: well, the US is just going to enforce its freedom of speech approach on Germany or the UK (where offending people is increasingly illegal). So all people and businesses in those nations should disregard their own laws and comply with US laws, you don't want to test the thesis about just how far US jurisdiction extends, better to comply with US freedom of speech laws instead.
Imagine me traveling to Britain and telling them that since I'm an American, their speech laws don't apply to me. I'm governed by US speech laws, regardless of where I'm at. That'd be good for a jolly laugh: look at this delusional, entitled American that thinks they control the planet. Or try telling the Chinese the same thing on their territory.
There are millions of small businesses in the US, very few of them will ever comply with GDPR - even if they have occasional stray EU customers - precisely because the EU has no jurisdiction and those businesses don't operate by EU law.
Account for deletion when designing the product. When considered from the beginning, the cost is typically negligible. It's only when shoehorned on the end that it gets expensive.
But... companies have had two years of notice about this. Any projects that have been running for fewer than two years have had plenty of notice. And it's not only the government who requires data deletion - it's your data sources (like Twitter) and your big customers who write it into their contracts.
Just plan for being able to delete data. You are gonna need it.
In my opinion the GDPR should have tiered regulations based on global revenue. It's pretty hard to profit off of data and not have some sort of cash flow
Yes, a Corporation that manages not to dump toxic waste in rivers is going to have a moat against smaller companies that do dump toxic waste in rivers.
But I'd rather it be illegal than have companies competing for who can externalize their costs more effectively by passing their problem of waste management to the state / local area.