Europeans aren't inherently better: if Facebook and Google were companies founded in Germany or France who knows if GDPR would exist.

The Data Protection Directive, which the GDPR merely extends and updates, is older than Google and almost as old as the web itself, and was an attempt to unify even older national laws regarding personal data. It's not a reaction to having "lost" the privacy-eroding race.

Unfortunately, many areas that would have been "safe" years ago, like games and standalone applications, are moving in the direction of violating privacy by phoning home and sending "telemetry" data, but there's still a lot of areas that are good.

We don't sell our data. We don't trade it. And we adhere to a fedramp medium (in spirit), even though the social media site wasn't checked for that.

Users have control over their profile, and we admins cant even read it (unless we read raw DB, and we dont). And deletion requests entail in zeroing out all user's data. The next day, zeroed data is then purged completely.

Seriously, companies can do this right. And I work for one that absolutely does this right.

Also I resent being told that anyone who works in tech gets their salary from eroding peoples privacy. I can guarantee you that hasn’t been the case for any of the jobs I’ve had in my career.

Further, and I want to make it clear that I don't mean this as a value statement, but is a printing company what most of us really think of a the "tech" industry? and by extension does that really make you the subject of what you are replying to?

The money they have to acquire companies raises the valuation of all startups.

I’m surprised most people don’t realize this.

Your own inherent weakness in morality doesn't implicitly infer that this is the inherent truth for everyone else in the tech or marketing industry. (Perhaps, moreso for tech than marketing but I digress.)

Not everyone in either industry is inherently on the "I'm just in it for the money" bandwagon.

That plus there are good historical reasons for our strong privacy laws.

So if you want better privacy laws in the US then they have to be much more clever than GDPR to not destroy the economy and global competitiveness!

BTW: Personally I think it is possible to do better than GDPR here in the US.

Excluding the U.K. and Ireland (tax haven) the difference between the EU and U.S. is greater, but (eyeballing) only on the order of 30-50%--e.g. ~4% vs ~6%.

What's more surprising is how small the share of GDP is the digital economy in the U.S.

That said, "digital economy" may be a poor proxy for understanding the impact of privacy regulations. It's a superset of tech industries, including much more than those parts which broker private information and to that extent would overestimate the impact. OTOH, I presume "digital economy" excludes large parts of non-tech industries (i.e. traditional sales and marketing companies, TV and newspaper ads, etc) and thus underestimates the potential impact.