It's not just ycombinator, it's everywhere on the internet. Too many bootlickers big government & big tech bootlickers not sounding alarms as soon as privacy violations happened is what caused this.
"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me." -1984
it's not just their direct cost, it's also the loss of revenue. the author wasn't arguing that they could save 435 million dollars in server costs.
Instead they were arguing that in addition to saving maybe a million or two in server costs, they would gain an additional 435 million dollars in revenue because less people would leave their website
for a company the size of kroger, $435M is an extremely conservative loss. If someone did proper research and determined that it's 3x, maybe 4x that much I would belive them.
When they fail they will pretend that the CEO of a messaging company is actually a criminal mastermind, and will throw him in jail for almost a week as soon as he steps into a european country, then he will not be allowed to leave the country for over a year, but I'm obviously exaggerating this would never happen, right?
Yeah, what of it? It helps protect my privacy rights online, though enforcement is severely lacking.
Hacker News intentionally doesn't comply with it, by the way - as a pure USA website which doesn't take payments, they didn't really have to, but they chose to make an ideology out of it anyway.
My comment, which, upon reflection was poorly written, was supposed to imply "remember how the European Union pretended to care about privacy, and created GDPR? That same european union wants to do this"
And it made the web experience way worse. Would have been much better to just take back the cookie popups in the browsers, and require each site to publish ToS in a standard format to the browser. I want to approve each data sink once, and each type of clause in ToSes once. They took the technically easy way out. Not very well thought out, but great for adding web dev jobs, of course.
Yes, the GDPR should have gone much further and just banned tracking. But we live in free-market capitalism (an oxymoron in the long run btw) so it was deemed unacceptable to take away people's ability to choose to give up their own rights.
