Invasive and pervasive surveillance. Private and sensitive data sold wholesale not even to the highest bidder, but to anyone.
Hell, when news about NSA surveillance broke, it was a huge scandal that was the focus of attention of all media for more than a year. Now Facebook alone is reported to have the same level of maliciousness and willfull ignorance on a monthly basis, and it’s business as usual.
So yes, I don’t give a rat’s ass about the “poor developers” who couldn’t get their shit together and provide privacy and security to the common people. And who now pretend they are being unfairly punished by governments.
"these costs fall on people who I feel deserve it" isn't a good reason to completely ignore the size of the costs being imposed. Especially since these costs are sublinear with respect to organization size, causing the tech behemoths you complain about to get a free competitive advantage against upstarts threatening their business model.
I'm rather confused as to why you're harping on about whether or not developers "deserve sympathy". I'd be making the same points about pretty much any business regulation - that they impose costs, and that we need to be cognizant of them in order to make sure it's a net positive. If the costs outweigh the benefits, then the regulation is a good thing. If they don't, but you advocate for it anyways because don't care about hurting a specific class of people that don't "deserve sympathy", that makes you quite a mean-spirited person.
>If anything, startups benefit: they have less data and systems.
It's not about the absolute costs of regulatory compliance, which are relatively small. It's about the relative costs of compliance compared to the economic value of regulated activity. Google has roughly a million times more revenue than a ten-person start-up will. Privacy compliance is not a million times more expensive for Google than it is for the start-up. If it costs a startup a day of engineering effort to comply, and it costs Google ten million dollars, this is a relative business advantage for Google.
This is a pretty general pattern; established businesses get a competitive advantage from regulation, since it prevents competition from arising. If it costs $400 to get your setup inspected before you can sell lemonade that you make, this helps Nestle sell more bottled lemonade at the cost of your kids' lemonade stand.
> If they don't, but you advocate for it anyways because don't care about hurting a specific class of people that don't "deserve sympathy", that makes you quite a mean-spirited person.
Let's not gloss over the fact that the specific class of people who are "hurt" are the ones causing the hurt. If they only collected data they needed and secured the data they did collect, the regulation wouldn't be needed in the first place.
It's not mean-spirited to expect people who have widely profited from collecting bulk data to foot the bill for securing that data.
Invasive and pervasive surveillance. Private and sensitive data sold wholesale not even to the highest bidder, but to anyone.
Hell, when news about NSA surveillance broke, it was a huge scandal that was the focus of attention of all media for more than a year. Now Facebook alone is reported to have the same level of maliciousness and willfull ignorance on a monthly basis, and it’s business as usual.
So yes, I don’t give a rat’s ass about the “poor developers” who couldn’t get their shit together and provide privacy and security to the common people. And who now pretend they are being unfairly punished by governments.
And yes, I’m a developer myself.