4 ms·

Absolutely. It is a disrespectful, shameful lie by the authors of the site.

echelon 1y ago
No it's not. It's dealing with the red tape of EU cookie legislation. Do you want to know how many human years my last company had to devote to regulation? We could have built a hundred startups with all that effort. I'm not saying GDPR right to be forgotten and data dump/portability isn't important, but it comes with a steep cost that everyone pays everywhere. So much time and money was spent on it. Easily billions of dollars. And the cookie stuff? How useful has that been?
- wizzwizz4 1y ago
  Have you read the EU cookie legislation? It actually requires you to not lie to users about what your cookies are for. Whatever the reason for a message like this, you can't blame EU legislation. ePrivacy and GDPR compliance are cheap. Trying to rules-lawyer them to keep illegal business models going, while dodging regulatory scrutiny, is expensive.
  - echelon 1y ago
    > ePrivacy and GDPR compliance are cheap. Try running a business that has to maintain GDPR compliance and KYC / AML / FINRA compliance. That is not cheap.
    - wizzwizz4 1y ago
      GDPR article 6.1(c) has you covered: no additional costs are incurred, if you're doing things properly. Did you have a specific issue complying with this legislation?
      - echelon 1y ago
        Regulation is a moat. It costs money to build systems that comply. Building compliance is not building for your customers direct asks and requirements. Especially software that does not originate in the EU. How many startups are building data export to comply with data export regulations? I spent nearly a year plumbing through complex microservices to satisfy GDPR at my last company. We collected an enormous amount of PII and KYC data from payments processing, and there were so many downstream services impacted. And I was just one engineer from amongst dozens of impacted teams that had to deal with it. Regulatory compliance is not free. Regulatory compliance is frictionful. I'm not saying regulation is bad, but that it is a cost of doing business and a tax on engineering. Especially for startups looking to go toe to toe with bigger incumbents that have already paid for compliance and that can afford to pay fees to ignore compliance to go fast.
        wizzwizz4 1y ago
        If it took "nearly a year" to satisfy GDPR, then your company's practices were, frankly, irresponsible (and perhaps still are), and it's a good thing you were forced to do that work. (Either that, or you misunderstood the legislation, and wasted thousands of hours when you could've just spent 3 hours reading it.) GDPR-compliance in a greenfield project is cheaper than dirt, up until someone makes a GDPR request, at which point it's slightly more expensive than dirt because you had to take 15 minutes out of your day to satisfy the request. By your third or fourth GDPR request, it's perhaps worth taking time to implement an automated flow, but having that many customers is a lovely problem to have!
  - apricot 1y ago
    Asking marketing people not to lie. Good luck with that. Might as well ask water not to be wet.
- shadowgovt 1y ago
  You're being downvoted, but you're right. At this point, I think it would be interesting if somebody did an analysis of the total cost spent for GDPR compliance against, say, a massive education campaign across the entire EU about how cookies work.
  - echelon 1y ago
    I'm being downvoted because people like privacy regulations. And of course -- I do too. But my point is orthogonal to liking the regulation.
    - gostsamo 1y ago
      I'm downvoting you because you don't include the costs for not having the regulation at all. Complaining about it is like complaining that safely disposing of hazardous materials incurs costs to your business and how much stuff would've been possible if you were just allowed to throw it down the river.
      - shadowgovt 1y ago
        What are those costs?
  - harperlee 1y ago
    GDPR goes way beyond cookies so that dichotomy is nonsensical.
junon 1y ago
Chill. This is the defacto statement, they probably just copied it from somewhere. GA was the only way to get a simple page count view without setting up a database or a backend system before we switched to serverless cloud step function lambda craziness. Seems like a passion project, and they just wanted to know if their work was used. I give people the benefit of the doubt on all of this when it's a small site.
- rcxdude 1y ago
  >they probably just copied it from somewhere. It would be nice if people read and meant something even if they copied it from somewhere.

No it's not. It's dealing with the red tape of EU cookie legislation. Do you want to know how many human years my last company had to devote to regulation? We could have built a hundred startups with all that effort. I'm not saying GDPR right to be forgotten and data dump/portability isn't important, but it comes with a steep cost that everyone pays everywhere. So much time and money was spent on it. Easily billions of dollars. And the cookie stuff? How useful has that been?

wizzwizz4 1y ago
Have you read the EU cookie legislation? It actually requires you to not lie to users about what your cookies are for. Whatever the reason for a message like this, you can't blame EU legislation. ePrivacy and GDPR compliance are cheap. Trying to rules-lawyer them to keep illegal business models going, while dodging regulatory scrutiny, is expensive.
- echelon 1y ago
  > ePrivacy and GDPR compliance are cheap. Try running a business that has to maintain GDPR compliance and KYC / AML / FINRA compliance. That is not cheap.
  - wizzwizz4 1y ago
    GDPR article 6.1(c) has you covered: no additional costs are incurred, if you're doing things properly. Did you have a specific issue complying with this legislation?
    - echelon 1y ago
      Regulation is a moat. It costs money to build systems that comply. Building compliance is not building for your customers direct asks and requirements. Especially software that does not originate in the EU. How many startups are building data export to comply with data export regulations? I spent nearly a year plumbing through complex microservices to satisfy GDPR at my last company. We collected an enormous amount of PII and KYC data from payments processing, and there were so many downstream services impacted. And I was just one engineer from amongst dozens of impacted teams that had to deal with it. Regulatory compliance is not free. Regulatory compliance is frictionful. I'm not saying regulation is bad, but that it is a cost of doing business and a tax on engineering. Especially for startups looking to go toe to toe with bigger incumbents that have already paid for compliance and that can afford to pay fees to ignore compliance to go fast.
      - wizzwizz4 1y ago
        If it took "nearly a year" to satisfy GDPR, then your company's practices were, frankly, irresponsible (and perhaps still are), and it's a good thing you were forced to do that work. (Either that, or you misunderstood the legislation, and wasted thousands of hours when you could've just spent 3 hours reading it.) GDPR-compliance in a greenfield project is cheaper than dirt, up until someone makes a GDPR request, at which point it's slightly more expensive than dirt because you had to take 15 minutes out of your day to satisfy the request. By your third or fourth GDPR request, it's perhaps worth taking time to implement an automated flow, but having that many customers is a lovely problem to have!
- apricot 1y ago
  Asking marketing people not to lie. Good luck with that. Might as well ask water not to be wet.
shadowgovt 1y ago
You're being downvoted, but you're right. At this point, I think it would be interesting if somebody did an analysis of the total cost spent for GDPR compliance against, say, a massive education campaign across the entire EU about how cookies work.
- echelon 1y ago
  I'm being downvoted because people like privacy regulations. And of course -- I do too. But my point is orthogonal to liking the regulation.
  - gostsamo 1y ago
    I'm downvoting you because you don't include the costs for not having the regulation at all. Complaining about it is like complaining that safely disposing of hazardous materials incurs costs to your business and how much stuff would've been possible if you were just allowed to throw it down the river.
    - shadowgovt 1y ago
      What are those costs?
- harperlee 1y ago
  GDPR goes way beyond cookies so that dichotomy is nonsensical.

junon 1y ago

Chill. This is the defacto statement, they probably just copied it from somewhere. GA was the only way to get a simple page count view without setting up a database or a backend system before we switched to serverless cloud step function lambda craziness. Seems like a passion project, and they just wanted to know if their work was used. I give people the benefit of the doubt on all of this when it's a small site.

rcxdude 1y ago
>they probably just copied it from somewhere. It would be nice if people read and meant something even if they copied it from somewhere.