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wave84HNSource author
Business & incomeExperience excerpt · English

One day I got a letter from the national authority regarding personal data where I was asked to …

… One day I got a letter from the national authority regarding personal data where I was asked to reply to 15 questions regarding a personal project of mine, invoking the GDPR. The sanctions for not complying within 5 days was an incremental fine of 600 euros PER DAY, until I complied. This letter was directed to me as a natural person (not even my company). Another story: I had a publishing website with some ads on it. The moment full GDPR went into effect, some years ago, revenue instantly dropped by 30% because the cookie banner I was using wasn't part of the approved european framework for cookie banners (they created an entire organization for this, called IAB). Most of the "approved" cookie banners are insanely overengineered nonsense and almost all of them cost a lot of money. And they kill your performance metrics. And when I finally gave in and implemented one of those, revenues dropped even more because I was losing readers who just quit without consenting at all. …

Original discussionEurope is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws1,168 source comments · at import
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EP
epolanskiHN

I'm not understanding, as an European who's been part of multiple startups how's that supposed to boost growth. There's literally 0 startups I've been part of where data protection laws or even the infamous cookie banners have been anywhere near relevant (unless your business was literally profiling). In fact the actors that most opposed those laws have always been non Europeans. Sure, there is an attached cost in having your terms reviewed by a proper lawyer and documenting the entire list of cookie providers, but that's basically where it ends. It's really minimal effort and cost, we talking in the low single digits for the review, and few hours of engineering time. The biggest issues in European growth are others: - focus on being an export economy while neglecting the internal market. - bureaucracy to fight at European level so we still don't have a real unified market, neither in ph…

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IM
immibisHN

Did you consider running non-tracking ads? Of course not because even after the 30% drop, the spyware still pays more, right? But destroying websites with spyware is literally what the law is for - the people have voted to nuke your website from orbit.

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TR
troupoHN

> because the cookie banner I was using wasn't part of the approved european framework for cookie banners (they created an entire organization for this, called IAB) There's your mistake. It's not approved. The EU literally sued them for coming up the bullshit banner: https://www.euractiv.com/news/top-eu-court-finds-widely-empl... It's in the name : IAB stands for Interactive Advertising Bureau . They couldn't give two shits about your site. All they care is about testing the limits of the law to get their hands on any and all user data. Their banners originally were explicitly illegal: https://noyb.eu/en/where-did-all-reject-buttons-come (this describes mostly OneTrust banners, but IAB's banners were the same) and https://noyb.eu/en/say-no-cookies-yet-see-your-privacy-crumb... (IAB's banner turned your "no to tracking" into "yes to tracking") > So in my opinion, despite originally being…

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