- American companies just laughed in the face of GDPR legislation. Their legal departments probably had a whole load of other stuff ready to roll out anyway. “By continuing to use this website…” and whatever too long scroll down you never bothered looking at just got longer. Amazon already has a segment referring to the zombie apocalypse. In essence, they treated it like the completely counter productive cookie acceptance button.
- Smaller companies struggled to understand it and comply. In essence all such regulation plays into the hands of bigger companies. They have IT departments, marketing strategies, legal eagles and everything you need to understand and deal with it. Small businesses are now weighed down by one more hurdle. The European Union shot them in the foot of any plans they had to get more digital.
- A whole ecosystem of advisors had a field day. Some of us are old enough to remember that the same thing happened with Y2K and every other end of the world scenario. Marketing “specialists”, legal “experts” and IT “consultants” love this sort of thing. You are paying for them to prove you need them. To make you feel safe. To cover your ass when the boss asks if everything is OK.
Let me be clear. I am in no way a Euro skeptic. I love the way they managed to ban roaming charges. When they facilitate trade or movement of people in Europe. But not this. This is too little, too late. So late that it isn’t even relevant. If they want to beat Silicon Valley, this approach will not work. If they want to levy enormous fines on Google or Facebook they don’t need to invent pitiful excuses like this.
Innovation. These days, even in the legal department tricks you have to do much much better than GDPR.