Which of the specific points the GP mentioned do you think is about how they handle user data? As far as I can see, every one of them is administrative in nature.
They're not saying they're going to be tracking everyone in shady ways. They're not saying they're going to be storing unencrypted details and unhashed passwords. They're not saying they're going to be forwarding your every secret to a Sith lord.
They are saying they don't have time to respond to a legal DoS if someone sends them a letter obviously written in bad faith, and they are saying they don't have the resources for their startup to police every major service they depend on. I imagine almost any startup would be in the same position.
As it happens, this person also seems to have some common misunderstandings about their obligations and may be over-estimating the actual risks. That also happens when you write this kind of law, and as we see here, the chilling effect is real.
You don't have to hire an expensive company to go through your systems. There is no such thing as GDPR "compliant" it is a series of steps for which a company can self-certify based upon the data they collect and the way that data is used. These steps are again good practice e.g. only collect the data you really need, database encryption, access controls and so on.
In terms of "nightmare letters" - your company should have a privacy policy which answers a user's generic concerns, again this is good practice. If a user requests a copy of their data or to have data removed this is a simple reapeatable process that you should design into your system from day one. Remember, the key premise of GDPR is "privacy by design". If you take that into consideration when designing and building your solution, you are 90% of the way there.
You don't have to constantly monitor 3rd parties privacy policies and update your own. Your privacy policy, which I think we all agree every company which collects personal data should have, can link to the privacy policies of the companies you send data to.
If a privacy regime is going to have any value in practice, it has to work on the same basis. The emphasis has to be ensuring that each individual or organisation who actually knows about the way data is being processed and has the ability to influence that processing is behaving reasonably. Then you can have some sort of trust framework that can actually mean something, from the data subject to their direct contacts and right on through to the indirect service providers however far the chain goes. The rest is just CYA and box-ticking, no matter how many laws you write or what penalties you threaten.
Seems a bad analogy, do you make a contract with them but not read it? I mean in the contract you will specify what cleaning products can or should be used(like in some hospitals strong cleaning products must be supplied and you ask for those in the contract if the supplier gives you bad quality ones then sure it is not your fault but it is your fault if you don't even want to read the contract terms)
I imagine the OP was thinking that he wants to embed in his pages some analytics or similar scripts, maybe some advertising scripts, use a few third party APIs and it seems a lot of work for him.
At least his US customers can now know that their data are could be shared with many third parties that could have weird terms like those third parties could sell it further.
I guess my point is that just knowing of the possibilities isn't particularly helpful on its own. If we're interested in actual privacy and data protection, instead of merely paying lip service to them, what matters is not just what a data subject knows but what control they have and what protections against harm they automatically enjoy. So much of the discussion around the GDPR and privacy policies and this whole subject more generally is only about telling people how they're being exploited instead of just exploiting them quietly without them knowing as happened before. That might be a step in the right direction, but it's far from where I would like the emphasis to be.
Because the commenter above makes a fantastic point that I hadn't thought about before, the GDPR requires that kind of knowledge and verification of user data. Not just in your company, not just in the companies you work with, but the companies they work with, and the ones that they work with, and so on.
It's akin to requiring the gas station to post legal notices that the computers it uses for the POS system are manufactured by a company which has verified that the parts that it uses were sourced from a place which was able to check that the materials used were mined by a company that treats their employees safely.
(i'm not against something like the GDPR, but I do feel it goes a bit too far in a handful of areas)
About the cleaning example if you had a contract that asked for a certain level of quality and they sent you bad product or did a bad job then it is your duty to stop this if you are aware the contract requirements are not respected.
I would also do some tests on the quality of the cleaning products just because people are greedy and they could send me bad products and cost me later.
That's a LOT to ask.
I shut down a side project that stored some cookies on the browser for some small settings, and allowed users to upload images of stuff they made in the browser to imgur if they wanted. After looking at the GDPR, I decided to shut it off. I don't have the time or ability to properly vet all of the possible places a users information could end up (user's information in this case is possibly an IP address which the hosting provider might have, but i don't know or have a way of knowing, and the image that they created in the browser which can optionally go to imgur), and the project made me a total of $11 of profit, and from a lawyer I talked to at my main employer, just blocking EU users isn't enough.
What I hope is that this third party services will advertise the fact they respect GDPR or put documentation on how to properly use this APIs and respect GDPR.
As a user when I get the GDPR prompt that has only the Accept button I just close that page or if I really want to see the content I use a private window, accept the popup .
If i would build my own product SPA I would avoid the third parties crap, if I can't because I really need the third party I would make sure to read the TOS since at my work I seen how much it sucks getting screwed by a third party.