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This is right and proper, and I don't see what the problem is.

The problem is that it will be almost impossible to comply with the letter of the law in this case without either imposing prohibitive levels of overhead or disregarding other good practices like logging diagnostics and keeping robust backups in case things go wrong.

There's a saying about babies and bathwater, but this is more like requiring the entire house to be rebuilt in order to throw out the bathwater. Sure, you can do it, but it's much easier to say that when it's someone else's manual labour being paid for by someone else's money that will make it happen.




The problem is that it will be almost impossible to comply with the letter of the law in this case without either imposing prohibitive levels of overhead

If the business requires this much overhead in order to internalize the data-externalities that it's generating, the business does not deserve to exist. Privacy violations are an externality, just like pollution, climate change, or deforestation. The way we deal with these externalities is through regulations and taxes that force businesses to internalize the costs they're imposing upon the rest of us. OP's business is like a chemical plant that gets its feedstock from polluting suppliers. If pollution regulations make the feedstock prohibitively expensive, then it's a signal that the existing process for making the product product wasn't providing a net economic benefit to society, and that the process needs to be either reengineered or shut down. By the same token, if privacy regulations make your product unprofitable, then your business model either needs to be reengineered, or you need to shut down.

There's no rule saying that cities have to be covered in smog. Likewise there is no rule saying that online media has to be funded through advertising. In the case of pollution, externalities that appeared to be inevitable turned out to be the result of choices resulting from economic incentives. When regulation changed the incentives, the externalities were massively reduced (as evidenced by the fact that Pittsburgh today has some of the best air quality in the US). I'm confident that the same is true of online media. The only reason that it's funded by privacy-violating advertising is because privacy-violating advertising is the cheapest and easiest business model. But if you take that off the table, businesses will be forced to innovate and come up with new payment structures that better align their interests with those of their customers.


Did you just compare error logging and backups to toxic pollution?




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