Most criticism of GDPR on HN is a criticism of bad-faith attempts to pretend to comply, many of which are expressly forbidden by the GDPR. It's a well-written, plain English regulation, and I encourage everyone to read it before criticising it. (At the very least, point to the bits of the regulation you disagree with: it should only take around 5 minutes to look up.)

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dijit 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Hear hear.

My company had consultants come in to help with GDPR, I left after months of them being hired: more confused than I went in.

So I went to the source, and I found it surprisingly easy to read and quite clear.

I think theres a lot of bad faith discussion about the GDPR being complex by people who have a financial interest in people disliking it (or, parroting what someone else said).

Heres the full text: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE...

87 pages and nearly every edge case is carved out. Takes 20 minutes to read.

	▲	vanviegen an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> 87 pages and nearly every edge case is carved out. Takes 20 minutes to read. That's some serious speed reading! :-)
	▲	xienze an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		20 minutes to “read” 87 dense pages of legalese? Perhaps you meant to say “skim over.”

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pembrook an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I would call this the religious zeal response, it's been parroted so many times here that it's become fact, even though this is false.

The full text of GDPR is 261 pages long with 99 articles and 173 recitals. Here's a condensed version and guide to reading the actual passages that matter, still 88 pages long: https://www.enterpriseready.io/gdpr/how-to-read-gdpr/#:~:tex...

And even if it was, being easy to read is not necessarily good when it comes to regulation, because this means there is a WIDE berth for interpretation by court cases and judges. This becomes a shifting target that makes compliance impossible.

For example, you could write a one sentence net-zero law that says "All economic activity in the EU must be net zero by tomorrow."

However, what constitutes economic activty? Is heating my home in the winter economic activity? What if I work from home? What about feeding my children food? What about suppliers and parts from outside the EU? Finished goods vs. raw materials? How will we audit the supply chains on each globally? Who will enforce those audits and how detailed do they need to be? Etc. etc.

To these questions, the religious green fanatics on EcoHackerNews will simply reply: it's actually super easy to comply, you can read it yourself, it's one sentence!