The problem is that many European startups don't exist because potential founders don't want to have to deal with GDPR when they could focus on building a good product first.

And yes, tracking what users focus on is very relevant to building a good product. But that kind of entrepreneurial mindset is largely absent in Europe - my guess is most Europeans with such a mindset eventually go to America, whether they were born in 1850 or 1985.

> ...when they could focus on building a good product first

So not tracking every single molecule of detail about your users is incompatible with building a good product?

If being entrepreneurial means that I have to violate my user's privacy then I'd rather not be an entrepreneur, thanks. And again, if your business can't survive without being invasive and malicious to your users, then your business shouldn't exist. You won't see me or anyone else reasonable weeping about the dissolution of such entities, either.

If you’re building B2B software, It’s not that you can’t track but rather that you need to spend time building data retention infrastructure before customers would even consider trialing your solution.

There are no shortage of European startups and GDPR is really doesn’t prohibit a startup…unless your business model is trading personal data. And if it is, then you deserve to be regulated.

One press announcement from 5 years ago isn’t proof. Companies shutdown all the time and cite reasons beyond “our business model just wasn’t profitable”. Many other companies are just Trojan horses for data harvesting — and if those get shut down then good riddance because they’re exactly who GDPR was intended to protect us from.

If GDPR was really that problematic then it would be all over the news instead of a few nationalists outside of EU arguing about hypotheticals on random message boards.

If your product requires selling user data then maybe its not so good of a product.

GDPR doesnt prohibit you from monitoring your product. It just gets very serious when you abuse users without them agreeing.

Like Threads not launching in EU because of that.

I agree. I just wish there would be a browser setting where you could say "only ever functional cookies" and never see a cookie banner again. But I guess that would need to be forced on companies via another legislation. The free marked doesn't do such a user friendly thing.

Consent-o-matic does that https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-mat...

I want it to be standardized and guaranteed that it works with every website and every browsers. E.g. if something like the `DNT: 1` header is set don't even show me a consent banner, only give me functional cookies. And a law that requires websites to do that. Then there is no need for an add-on that constantly has to play cat and mouse with all websites and that only is available for certain browsers.