I get that too many regulations is a bad thing. But when we talk privacy and personal data there should be no gray zone. It has to be black and white. When I see a stupid cookie banner I search for "Reject all". There's no some data that companies can collect and process without my consent, they just shouldn't be able to collect anything without me actively opting in. Business never respects anything, but profits. Seeing news about relaxing these laws with the "AI" going after this leaves a bitter taste. And with them also trying to push the Chat Control thing, it gets even worse.

I've stopped thinking of regulations as a single dial, where more regulations is bad or less regulations is bad. It entirely depends on what is being regulated and how. Some areas need more regulations, some areas need less. Some areas need altered regulation. Some areas have just the right regulations. Most regulations can be improved, some more than others.

More regulation, or stronger regulation, as in less wiggle room for businesses, may be a good thing. Case in point: a regulation requiring to disclose the ingredients of food.

Too many regulations is almost always a bad thing: numerous pieces of regulation rarely fit together seamlessly. It becomes easier to miss some obscure piece, or to encounter a contradiction, or to find a loophole. The cost of compliance also grows, and that disproportionately favors big established players.

Most baffling thing is that sometimes you can't opt-out from "always active" stuff that still involve hundreds of "partners"; see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45844691

That cookie thing should a browser's default.

There are lots of uses for cookies that have absolutely nothing to do with collecting data about you.

Using an Ad blocker I feel regret for stealing the site's revenue. So I allow them to collect my personal data. Anyways, I think most of them will not respect my rejection.

Yep, it is exactly what the EU shouldn't do. This will actually further disadvantage EU companies, when US companies are left to run rampant. It also will take away any "made in EU" advantage that EU-local companies had over US competition. GDPR was exactly the right step. In fact it was not enforced strictly enough and should have been enforced much stricter, punishing all the shady businesses which employed dark pattern to extract personal data from citizen.

Europe has much more fatal startup-killing regulation problems than cookies, however. Who cares about cookies? I am on your site, you are going to plant/collect cookies. These goddamned banners are a solution in search of a problem, and it's yet another hurdle a company of, say, 3 has to go through, for very little reason.

I think I should be able to collect whatever publicly available data I can find.

They should have gone farther. Don't require the user's permission for non-essential tracking cookies. Just ban them outright. No opt in, no opt out, it's just straight-up illegal to track people unless they're actively using a signed in account.

The trouble is that everyone else is pursuing tech unhindered by such regulations at breakneck speed, and Europeans realize that Europe - once the center of science and technology - is increasingly sliding into a backwater in this space and an open air museum.

Now, some will agree with you and say that privacy should never be violated, but nonetheless accept a certain measure of tolerance toward that kind of violation, because they see rigid intolerance as causing more harm than the violation of privacy itself is causing [0]. This harm is chiefly the economic harm caused by the burden of regulation and the roadblocks it introduces.

Perhaps this isn't true, but if it is, then moral offense is likely to have little effect. A more effective means might be the make following regulations cheaper. Of course, as we know, when you make something cheaper, you increase demand. This means that EU institutions would likely see this as an opportunity to increase regulation, nullifying the gains of introducing less costly ways to adhere to regulation.

[0] This reminds me of Aquinas's view of prostitution. Naturally, Aquinas saw prostitution as a grave, intrinsic evil. No one is ever justified in soliciting the services of a prostitute, much less of being a prostitute. That's the moral stance; it concerns our personal moral obligations. However, from the position of the state and how the state should police such activity through law, Aquinas saw the criminalization of prostitution, however good in principle it might be, as a policy that would be practically worse - even disastrously so - than law and policy that is permissive toward prostitution. Whether you agree or disagree with him, the principle holds, namely, that the state not only does not need to police every bit of immorality, but by doing so, may actually contribute to the destabilization of society and to an even worse condition than the one it is saddled with.

Who is the audience your comment is trying to reach? Who are these mysterious "companies"?

It's important to realize companies are made of people.

Someone had to explicitly code the dark pattern in the GDPR cookie dialog. Ever notice the button for "Accept All" is big and shiny, while refusing all is more often than not a cumbersome, multi-click process?

That's not an accident. That was coded by people. People around us, people who post here. I'm sure "made GDPR dialog deceptively confusing" went on someone's accomplishment report that they then used to justify a raise or promotion.

> I get that too many regulations is a bad thing

Well yeah, cause your sentence relies on itself.

_Too many_ regulations is a bad thing.

But to have a lot of regulations, especially in fields where there is not much to be gained but oh so much being lost in the interest of capital gains like in generative AI, is a blessing rathr than a curse.

Do you really think that clicking on any button on cookie consent popups actually does anything? It's just an illusion of choice. The reality is that these sites will still track you, whether that's via cookies or, more commonly today, fingerprinting. When they list thousands of "partners" with "legitimate interest", it's a hint that there's a multi-billion-dollar industry of companies operating behind the scenes that will do whatever it takes to profile and track you, regardless of what you click on a silly form. Regulations like the GDPR don't come close to curtailing this insanity.

Yeah, but a lot of the rules around privacy and personal data make it hard to accept business from Europeans. If you are a small business or startup you might not even accept business from Europeans because navigating these rules are almost impossible.

> But when we talk privacy and personal data there should be no gray zone. It has to be black and white.

you are wrong. If one followed your ways, we would never do a lot of things. There are things called regulatory sandboxes for a reason. But those don't really work in fields where the "scale of the data" is the core reason of why things work.

Chat control is stupid.