We don’t scrap seatbelt and airbag regulations just because they’ve had some unintended side effects.

Regulations aren’t set in stone forever, either, and a functional legislative body can always modify and update them as their effects become more well known.

Or, well, maybe I sound too idealistic. But...I think most of us can all agree that consumer data protections are highly lacking.

Often the downsides do outweigh their utility.

Guess we don't need food safety laws anymore, prohibition was bad!

Surely you can understand the difference between prohibition and consumer-protection laws? They aren't even like, the same field of laws.

From the perspective of ordinary users, GDPR was a pretty successful law with no real downsides. Businesses have to be more careful with data, that's about it.

There is over regulation in some areas, but lets be real: it's already extremely difficult to break into existing sectors, just as a result of industrialization, brand recognition, etc. The idea of the scrappy upstart is overwhelmingly a fantasy. This regulation won't prevent any businesses worth forming from getting underway, in my opinion.

More like, "almost never do the down sides outweigh their utility, because they aren't designed by idiots".

My only point is to support your case that it's not always idealistic to believe that some regulations, even ones that have been in place for decades, even with today's questionably functional government, can go away.

The emissions check program is aimed at carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, and particulate pollution. Properly functioning emissions systems ensure a vehicle operates efficiently, but the effect on a car or truck's overall greenhouse gas emissions is fairly small - and it is greenhouse gases (primarily carbon dioxide) that are driving climate change.

Vehicles are still the largest source of carbon pollution in Washington. We are working to change that by making sure new cars are more efficient than old ones, supporting zero-emission vehicles and cleaner fuels, and advancing transit, ridesharing and other alternatives to single occupancy vehicles.

we expect air quality to continue to improve as older vehicles are replaced with newer, cleaner cars. Ecology will continue to monitor air quality conditions throughout Washington. If we see any reasons for concern, we will certainly take action.

Yup. Especially here in the U.S.

Often times, they do. Often regulations don't even achieve their own goals. Sometimes they even result in the opposite.

My point is that this can be factored into the growth of the company, rather than seen strictly as a barrier to entry, as suggested by the comment above. Are there really fresh startups that really need to worry about this kind of data gathering out of the gate? I'm imagining they're going to be spending a lot more time engineering features and interfacing with important clients to get data to improve their product directly. I often see business/marketing folks wanting user data for what amounts to very premature optimization.

So does a lack of regulation. That's how we ended up here.