Lots of companies come unstuck because they fall into the trap of “let’s just collect everything and see what we can do with it”.
Or, I’ve got all this data I’ve collected legitimately. Who knew that you could sell it on to some data broken and make loads of money - let’s do that!
Or, I’ve collected all this data, I’m just going to keep it hanging around, oops I just put it on a public bucket and leaked it all. Hmm, I’m not even sure what data we had, have we just compromised a bunch of people? Who knows…
It's not supprising that many smaller companies are saying fuck this noise.
What is OpenAI GPT4 and Google bard/Gemini EU version not doing so they work in EU but the latest Google AI is doing so google is incapable of putting it in EU ?
Maybe latest one is more invasive with ypur personal account? Scanning your personal data without consent ?
Because seems to be a super simple business, user sends you a prompt, you run the prompt and send the result back, you keep nothing unless necessary for the service to work and give the user the ability to purge their history/data .
I'm glad that Microsoft / OpenAI is confident enough to put out a global consumer facing gen AI offering. Maybe they received EU assurances, or maybe they have enough legal muscle to tank any possible hit, and eating Google's lunch is a prize worth the risk.
Google is in a completely different situation. Gemini is, so far, a niche product, making little to no money for Google. However, due to how the GDPR works, a mistake with Gemini could cost the entire company dearly, impacting the profits they make from any other products.
This is a more general principle. If you're a small startup that manufactures foos, and there's a risk that manufacturing Foos infringes on Apple's patents, well, that's just one of the risks you have to bear as a startup. If you get wiped out by a lawsuit, you're established as a limited-liability corporation for a reason, if the fine is larger than the worth of your company, you can just declare bankruptcy and go away. You can't decide to stop manufacturing Foos, as that's your entire business.
If you're the size of Google, getting into the Foo-manufacturing business is not worth it. If Apple sues you, that won't just impact the Foo-manufacturing side of your business, the fine can be significantly larger than any profits you ever hoped to make from the venture, not to mention the brand damage, strain on resources etc. If Foo manufacturing is ultimately going to be a side business for you, it's probably not worth it to be the hill you die on.
This is why it makes sense for startups to "move fast and break things™", and for big corporations to require countless legal reviews on the smallest of decisions.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's a long and arduous procedure to clear a new product for GDPR compliance, and the PM had a choice between launching now and excluding the EU or launching later for everybody. This is also what originally happened with Bard.
If by design you can do whatever pleases you, then yes you have a lot of innovation. But sometimes it leads to normalisation of troubles (e.g. data leaks in the US), and incredulity of the general public ("how did we even get there")?
There are good reasons to ponder ethics in the original balance too, it hasn't got to be completely paralysing either. But this comes with a cost (e.g. typically, for any data-sensitive work these days complying with GDPR, a significant part of the design & implementation time is "are we compliant").
They could have easily made law requiring sites accept DNT header but they didn't likely because of lobbying.
DNT is not relevant as GDPR is not directly a regulation against tracking, and it certainly isn't because of lobbying.
> If you want to comply it is easy.
That's the entire antithesis of modern law as opposed to monarchy. Law should be codified in as clear rules as possible.
As a European I to try see it from both sides, consumer protections are generally a good thing, but it right now being restricted by EU vagueness sucks ass because I just want to play with the cool new toys.