Black Hat: GDPR privacy law exploited to reveal personal data
This is the problem with overly aggressive legislation. The big companies performed well, the small companies ignored the law, and the medium sized companies tried to comply and failed. You can’t legislate good behavior because people will always find a way around the laws. The legal philosophy behind GDPR seems to be nothing more than to make everyone a criminal and then choose who to prosecute, and in that case why have laws at all rather than letting law enforcement punish whoever they choose?<p>At the end of the day this incentivizes big companies to comply with the laws because they can afford the necessary legal teams and the laws provide a moat to their entrenched power. It incentivizes small companies to ignore the laws just like the move fast and break things mentality of Silicon Valley. The people it hurts are the medium sized, growing companies who are best positioned to fight the big monopolies but are now being held back by well meaning but over burdensome legislation.<p>The good side of GDPR is that it’s trying to advocate for consumer privacy, which overall is a good thing. The issue is that it’s not a legal problem. In the same way you can’t declare drugs to be illegal and expect the supply of drugs to instantly disappear, you can’t declare misuse of data illegal and expect the same. As long as the data has value there will be a market for it, so why not draft sensible regulations instead of trying to solve the problem with laws.