Silicon Valley is terrified of California’s privacy law

Re:Silicon Valley is terrified of California’s privacy law by novok on Thursday September 19, 2019 @04:32PM (#21020442)

The GDPR is pretty bad for under 5 engineer startups. They can be very privacy respecting small businesses that charge for their product, like sql training courseware[0], and wouldn't mind clearing what little personal data they had on you (user server logs, billing info, etc).

But being privacy respecting and properly complying with GDPR with audit log systems, etc are 2 different things that require hiring 1 or 2 extra engineers or causing them to pause the companies roadmap as 1 or more people implement government bureaucracy infrastructure for half a year.

If they say it's easy and cheap, then they haven't actually tried to do it properly and are exposing themselves to multi-million dollar penalties.

[0] https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2017/12/gdpr-stopped-selli...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Silicon Valley is terrified of California’s privacy law by zbentley on Friday September 20, 2019 @05:43AM (#21024859)

I've heard this line so many times, but there are vanishingly few examples of companies that really suffered for it ("just don't sell in Europe" implies, to me, that Europe wasn't valuable enough to you as a market to take the time engineering GDPR compliance--and that's just fine). The ones that did crash overwhelmingly seemed to be sketchy data brokers.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Silicon Valley is terrified of California’s privacy law by novok on Friday September 20, 2019 @04:07PM (#21030694)

I think a bunch of them took the "if audited we will probably be screwed unless the enforcing body takes leniency on us" and just kept on going. It opens up everyone to another huge liability but that's business. DPOs only have so many staff to investigate complaints.

[ Parent | on HN ]