EU bashing aside, we 've seen this play out before. Search for old HN comments on the cookie law: It was supposed to reduce traffic by 90%, but nowadays its wor

EU bashing aside, we 've seen this play out before. Search for old HN comments on the cookie law: It was supposed to reduce traffic by 90%, but nowadays its worse than useless. GDPR will fail too, because it does not address the crux of the issue: that most people do not care about willfully handing over their data, and in fact many of them take pleasure at being public. Most people will not care to delete their data from the service they used for 1 day. They will not ask their local bakery to hand them over reports etc. Most people spend most of their time on facebook, and most of them have already opted-in to the kind of processing that facebook does. Google, amazon, netflix, spotify etc are in line, because people are not going to give up on the most useful tech services. Some of the worst private offenders in europe are actually public services like tax authorities who dug up tons of stolen data from banks, financial services, or who use google maps and facebook to find out who is flaunting their wealth. While not NSA-level, police authorities are catching up. Registries of all kinds with very private info have very lax access rules in EU countries outside the rich north. Sure, some techies may feed their entitlement by going after some glaring cases of violations for a few months, but the case remains that, if privacy is a big issue, people are going to have to pay for it (i.e. they have pay a premium). Cryptography/decentralization remains another option.