GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers
 I’ve been reading hacker news for about a decade, and it’s getting to the point where I don’t think there are many entrepreneurs and&#x2F;or technical people on here anymore.<p>The number of people who are saying it’s no big deal to comply with this huge law, especially for very small startups, is mind boggling.<p>Let’s just take one feature: the requirement that you can permanently delete all of your information.  Most early-stage startups use the (in 2008, when I did mine) best practice of “delete=1”.   Changing your whole database over to permanent cascade delete is only easy if you’re a very experienced programmer or who knows what he’s doing.  And that sets aside the fact  that even if you know what you’re doing technically, there are lots of business logic problems with just deleting things out of the database and anonymizing users is very tricky.<p>I was not a great programmer when I started my first startup.  I was learning as I went along.<p>We couldn’t afford a lawyer, and the amount of time for me (the only programmer) to go through and read all the regulations and make all the requisite changes in the product I would estimate might take on the order of a month or two, which if timed poorly would’ve killed our company.   I say again: at an early stage startup with one programmer, you cannot have that one programmer spending two months on compliance.<p>It’s just gotten to the point that there’s one comment after another responding to this regulation or that regulation or this situation or whatever with “well, just call HR“, or “I can’t believe you don’t have a company policy for that!”<p>Or “well just ask your lawyers“.  It ain’t that easy.  Do you have any idea how much it would cost to have “your lawyers” go through the GDPR, tell you what you need to do, and deal with all of the edge cases and gray areas? $20k or $30k doesn’t seem too high.<p>My biggest fear is that all of these complex bureaucratic laws are just raising the bar for doing a startup.  Maybe the days of two people doing a startup in someone’s garage should be in the past?  If so, that makes me kind of sad.<p>Regardless it’s not obvious that GDPR is the right policy or that it’s well designed or clear.