Legislation in favour of the consumer is almost starting to seem detrimental to the startup founder. The number of barriers, prerequisites, requirements, etc that a founder needs to consider pre-launch is bordering on insurmountable.
This might just be me feeling like this, but even considering geo-residency in some of my early prototype designs feels very odd.
I was optimistically hoping PaaS providers would catch up and fill in the middle ground. But seemingly for every Enterprise customer I'm manually filling out a document declaring our data residency, our vendors residency and how we use certain data.
I'm an advocate for privacy, but f* me this is getting to be overwhelming.
That sounds more like legislated administrative burden and nothing to do with consumer protection. A law to protect consumers can be developed without all the burdens. (why do you need a declaration?, you're either compliant or you're not.)
You don't need all of that stuff if your business respects people's privacy by design.
It's like complaining that the GDPR is causing cookie banners on every site. That's only half the reason. The real reason is that the websites need one's opt-in to do something they shouldn't be doing. Obviously the law should have been crafted with an automatic system to reject all non-necessary cookies in mind, but the fault for the cookie banners still lies with the website.
If your system has the notion of users at all, then most of that red tape is unavoidable, no matter how privacy-respecting you are being.
Either a solid and affordable PaaS solution or at the very least a single global international standard is sorely needed here. The current model is barely sustainable as it is, and it's getting worse, even for privacy-respecting endeavors.
The culture and politics around what startups are and can be seem to have avoided these questions too long. Now that we're evaluating these concerns more in earnest I think it is worth a little soul-searching to determine if it really is worth the money to follow the herd and invest one's time and effort into such applications of technology.
This might just be me feeling like this, but even considering geo-residency in some of my early prototype designs feels very odd.
I was optimistically hoping PaaS providers would catch up and fill in the middle ground. But seemingly for every Enterprise customer I'm manually filling out a document declaring our data residency, our vendors residency and how we use certain data.
I'm an advocate for privacy, but f* me this is getting to be overwhelming.