> minimise collection

> anonymise things early

> remove data promptly when no longer needed,

> make it easy to audit what data you do hold

These (and others) are the costs I am speaking of. The vast majority of HN commenters will tell you that these costs are worth the upside in user privacy (which is totally fine!).

My point here is that the costs are not fixed. Over the decades we will see other, often sensible costs added to this list. While each individual cost may be small, they do accumulate and they influence who can and cannot start a business (or even personal website!) that deals with individuals from the EU.

Large companies will always be able to pay these costs. Some small companies may not. What you make of this is up to your personal interpretation, but I will miss the web of 00's where it felt like anyone could build a website or online business with next to no overhead.

The infrastructure to do analytics this easily does not exist - unless you expect a 65 yr old to trawl through Apache logs on the command line? Extrapolate that to everything from audits, logging, anonymization of data and of course it's going to push people to use centralized solutions.

From my perspective open source communities seem to have an ideological issue against analytics and business data, so very few solutions exist outside of big tech. What am I to do?

If it's "killing a few companies" and "a startup doesn't end up seeing the light" then "GDPR is doing what I'd like it to do."

That's a pretty shitty opinion to hold.

What did those companies and startups do wrong? I'm as tired of stupid startups as the next person, but I won't cheer for their failure unless they actually do something wrong.

Stop saving PII for profit/exploitation reasons and you're in the clear.

Well for one, they ignored users and the authorities asking them to stop their illegal data collection. No company is getting "killed" or even fined at all when they are not actively refusing to get compliant.