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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026

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I think that GDPR specifically was a step in the right direction of forcing companies to give more than absolutely zero shits about the privacy of their customers

People will say stuff like this but GDPR is actually a gigantic pain in the ass to everyone involved because it means every single database the holds any data about anything has to be manually cleared by engineers to not happen to obliquely contain data the could be viewed as slightly about europe. I'm going to have to get on early morning calls for the next six months to get our US facing entirely internal application dealing in US tax credits cleared because of this stupid law. All while the fly by night company registered in kekistan that will actually do malicious stuff with your data just ignores the law and all the apps that were collecting it on purpose before put up a cookie that 99.98% of people accept immediately with minor annoyance. The legislators behind this should be tried at the Hague for pissing away thousands or millions of lifetimes worth of dev hours for their pure hubris.