Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws
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GDPR
AI regulation
European Union
The European Union is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws, sparking controversy among HN users about the impact on privacy and innovation.
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I assume you mean the AI related stuff?
Finally!
Even EU government websites had annoying giant cookie banners.
Yet, some how the vast majority of HN comments defend the cookie banners saying if you don't do anything "bad" then you don't need the banners.
Because that’s how it is. For instance why does a site need to share my data with over 1000 "partners“?
And the EU uses the same tracking and website frameworks as others so they got banners automatically.
It wasn’t a mistake but website providers maliciously complied with the banners to shift the blame.
Seems you fell for it.
There are a LOT of shades of gray when it comes to website tracking and HN commenters refuse to deal with nuance.
Imagine running a store, and then I ask you how many customers you had yesterday and what they are looking at. "I don't watch the visitors - it's unnecessary and invasive". When in fact, having a general idea what your customers are looking for or doing in your store is pretty essential for running your business.
Obviously, this is different than taking the customer's picture and trading it with the store across the street.
When it comes to websites and cookie use, the GDPR treated both behaviors identically.
the issue were the 100s of tracking cookies and that websites would use dark patterns or simply not offer a "no to all" button at all (which is against the law, btw.)
Most websites do. not. need. cookies.
It's all about tracking and surveillance to show you different prices on airbnb and booking.com to maximise their profits.
https://noyb.eu/en/project/cookie-banners (edit: link)
All websites need cookies, at least for functionality and for analytics. We aren't living in the mid-1990s when websites were being operated for free by university departments or major megacorps in a closed system. The cookie law screwed all the small businesses and individuals who needed to be able to earn money to run their websites. It crippled everyone but big megacorps, who could just pay the fines and go ahead with violating everyone's privacy.
And BTW because I don't care about your cookies, I don't need to bother you with cookie banner. It's that easy.
Also, if I would implement user management for whatever reason, I would NOT NEED to show the banner also. ONLY if I shared the info with third side. The rules are simple yet the ways people bend them are very creative.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track
Because that made more sense than the cookie banner ever did.
Edit: it looks like there is a legal alternative now: Global Privacy Control.
Europe's cookie nightmare is crumbling. EC wants preference at browser level - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45979527 - Nov 2025 (80 comments)
This is a loss for European citizens and small businesses and a win for the trillion dollar ecosystem of data abuse.
This is a very odd framing, because the actual reason from quotes in the article is that the EU is acutely feeling the pain of having no big tech companies, due in part to burdensome privacy regulations.
The pressure isn't really from big tech, it's from feeling poor and setting themselves up as irrelevant consumers of an economy permeated by AI.
A large part is due to their approach to startup investing and chronic undercapitalization. GDPR is coming up 10 years now and the worries about it were overblown. What hasn't budged is Europe is very fiscally conservative on technology. Unless it's coming from their big corporations it's very hard to get funding. Everyone wants the same thing, a sure bet.
GDPR showed that once you are a ten-billion dollar company, your compliance team can manage GDPR enough to enter the market. For a startup, starting in the EU or entering the EU early is still extremely difficult because the burdens do not scale linearly with size.
This means that yes, US tech giants can sell into the EU, but the EU will never get their own domestic tech giants because they simply cannot get off the ground there.
Even extreme proponents of big tech villanery in the US (Lina Khan's FTC) is also facing losses (They just lost their monumental case against Meta yesterday).
What I really want to see is Meta getting irrelevant ON MERIT. People stop using Meta products, and then I want to see it die. But not by forcing the hand - that's bad for everyone, especially the enterpreuer / hacker types on this site
While they are at it, I hope they do it to the other big techs too.
Being a "hacker type" (whatever that means) does not equate to being complacent to these companies abusing their economic power.
Their track record is pretty good.
One of the things that made this place special relative to other online communities is the ethos to interrogate through a lens of curiosity. Now, there's a lot of vitriol that's indistinguishable from any other comment section.
That happened a decade ago. Users dropped from Facebook like flies and moved to Instagram. Mark Zuckerberg's response was to buy Instagram. The Obama DOJ waved through what was obviously a blatantly illegal merger.
Likewise, Google's only ever made two successful products: Search and e-mail. Everything else was an acquisition. In fact, Google controlled so much of the M&A market that YCombinator (the company that runs this forum) complained in an amicus brief that they were basically being turned into Google's farm league.
So long as companies can be bought and sold to larger competitors, no tech company will ever become irrelevant. They'll just acquire and rebrand. The only way to stop this is with the appropriate application of legal force.
Even worse, bought Whattsapp.
His response was 4 years back in time because he can see the future?
They moved from meta to meta.
Speaking of buying Instagram[1], it's plain to see that the horrible judges that Obama appointed simply don't believe that antitrust should exist.
Exactly what you would expect from the guy who let Citigroup appoint his cabinet[2]. The powers that be at the Democratic party thought that Hillary Clinton was too independent for corporate elites, and she makes a fairly good case that they fixed the primary because they thought he was their best chance to "save capitalism" after the crash. They were right. She even sabotaged her next campaign with her desperate need to show bankers that she was a safe choice (e.g. the secret speech.)
> Google's only ever made two successful products: Search and e-mail. Everything else was an acquisition.
And search was only successful for 5 minutes, until SEO broke PageRank. Since that one fragile (but smart) algorithm, and the innovation of buying Doubleclick, everything else has been taking advantage of the fact that we don't have a government that functions when it comes to preserving competition in the market. The West loves corporate concentration; it's better when your bribes come from fewer sources, and those sources aren't opposed to each other.
[1] James Boasberg; "Meta prevails in historic FTC antitrust case, won’t have to break off WhatsApp, Instagram" https://apnews.com/article/meta-antitrust-ftc-instagram-what...
HN is not a hive mind or a monoculture. Every time the EU goes after some company, some people always cheer, some people always boo, and some people will cheer some and boo others based on the impact/nuance of the particular policy or company.
In most of the threads I have observed about EU action on Big Tech, the overwhelming majority of thoughts are 'for', with perhaps few dissenting thoughts.
Most European regulations seemed to be less about helping regular people and more about protecting European ad firms, many of which are even shadier than big tech.
Where can I read more about that phenomenon?
The problem is that with a nearly infinite amount of money, you are not going to get irrelevant on merit. You just buy up any company/talent that becomes a threat. They have done that with Instagram and WhatsApp (which was and is really huge in Europe etc.).
That's impossible. The network effects are too strong. Facebook may die, or even Instagram, but WhatsApp is so intermeshed with the majority of the world that it can only be taken out by a government.
Yes, the network effects are very strong, but each of us has the possibility of making a small sacrifice for this thing to change.
Prior to 2020, FTC would have had a much stronger case. But too little too late.
Why? Is META relevant only on merit?
I'd like to see for myself, as I don't consider moving the consent method from the webpage to the browser settings "watering down" — it's the opposite.
https://cdn.netzpolitik.org/wp-upload/2025/11/EU-Kommission-...
https://cdn.netzpolitik.org/wp-upload/2025/11/EU-Kommission-...
The official website mentions these documents, but for some reason doesn't let you view them, saying "It will be possible to request access to this document or download it within 48 hours".
https://ec.europa.eu/transparency/documents-register/detail?...
https://ec.europa.eu/transparency/documents-register/detail?...
But it's not enough - they need to completely repeal the DSA, AI Act, ePrivacy Directive, and Cybersecurity Act at least. And also focus on unifying the environment throughout the EU - no more exit taxes, no need for notaries and in-person verbal agreements, etc.
There's just so much red tape and bureaucracy it's incredible. You can't hire or pay payroll taxes across the EU (without the hire relocating) - that's a huge disadvantage compared to the USA before you even get into the different language requirements.
With the advancement of AI being used to commit fraud through chat, video, and audio calls I think we're at the precipice of needing to in-person verbal agreements again.
And I thought the harmonization of markets in the EU would have reduced the red tape but some industries are built on it and will complain quite vocally if their MP makes any move on it.
The bizarre thing is now they advertise how fast they can read! Like it serves no purpose other than giving notaries and lawyers a slice of all transactions.
Europe is full of backwards stuff like this - where the establishment interests are so strong, it cannot be adapted for modern times. From blocking CRISPR and gene editing crops (while allowing the less controlled but older technology of radiation treatment), to blocking self-driving cars.
Great to see this finally. It’s obviously the way it should have been implemented from the beginning.
We still see this technically myopic approach with things like age verification; it’s insane to ask websites to collect Gov ID to age verify kids (or prove adulthood for porn), rather than having an OS feature that can do so in a privacy-preserving way. Now these sites have a copy of your ID! You know they are going to get hacked and leak it!
(Parents should opt their kids phones into “kid mode” and this would block age-sensitive content. The law just needs to mandate that this mode is respected by sites/apps.)
Good kid mode[0].
[0] https://www.lego.com/en-gb/product/retro-telephone-31174
An OS feature is also a terrible option - remember when South Korean banks forced the country to use ActiveX and Internet Explorer?
The government should offer some open digital ID service where you can verify yourself with 2FA online, after registering your device and setting credentials when you get your ID card + residence registration in person.
Just let Estonia run the programme [1].
[1] https://e-estonia.com/solutions/estonian-e-identity/id-card/
The challenges presented to sites, and verifiers if the scheme uses those, would have to be non-identifiable in the sense that they can't tell that 2 of them came from the same key. Otherwise there's a risk users get unmasked, either by a single leak from a site that requires age verification and a real name (e.g. an online wine merchant) or by unifying data sources (timing attacks, or identifying users by the set of age-restricted sites they use).
Perhaps I just don't understand the underlying crypto. That wouldn't be super surprising, I'm far from an expert in understanding crypto implementations.
That statement includes Ursula by the way.
If anything this is coming from political elite being convinced that AI research is a critical topic, EU recognizing it's weak because of the self-imposed handicaps and trying to move past that. I'd be shocked if we manage to do anything concrete on the matter TBH.
They need more strict financial regulation than politicians do!
Legislation can’t change culture.
Sure, there's way too much bureaucracy. But I see there things like taxes, regulations about the cucumber radius etc.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2008/no...
As an EU citizen, this is shameful and even kind of pathetic to read.
Will we start outsourcing all our IT needs to USA again?
You are quite right! They have never stopped. And I am ashamed on their behalf. We have amazing tech talent in the EU but we are beholden to old and ultra-risk-averse rich aristocracy. What a damned shame.
I hope the changes they implement will actually benefit small startups instead of relaxing regulations for large data hoarders.
Different rules for different people huh?
Just because you like the group you're benefiting and dislike the group you're harming doesn't mean that is good policy.
That’s how efficient market works. The bigger are the players, the higher are the chances they will distort the market. You need to apply the force proportional to size to return market back to equilibrium at maximum performance. We have anti-trust laws for this reason, so nothing new, nothing special.
You would be subject to one rule for your small company and another rule as it grows.
This is everywhere in society, from expectation difference between babies, kids, teenagers, adults and seniors and to tax bracket structures.
But you would actually prefer to be subject to the same rules as the state? I.e. typically nothing which isn't explicitly allowed is forbidden for you to do, you are forced to hand out copies of documents you produce, and so on?
I like folks who have to work for a living and dislike billionaires relaxing on yachts bought on their generational wealth, but in addition sociology metrics of the United States in the past 100 years suggest that the highest levels of happiness correlated pretty heavily with marginal tax rates as high as 100% based on wealth.
Compliance has fixed costs. And smaller operations have a smaller blast radius when things go wrong. Reducing requirements for smaller operators makes sense.
For instance, poor people should not have any tax breaks: everyone should pay exactly the same percentage of their income, like 15% all across the board or whatever.
Such ideas often have regressive effects.
However, I get it. When it comes to handling personal information, you simply can't say that the "little guys" don't have to follow all the rules, and can cheerfully mishandle personal information in some way.
Small operators have simpler structures and information systems; it should be easier for them to comply and show compliance, you would think (and maybe some of the requirements in the area can be simplified rather than rules waived.)
I'm hoping to go for my 3rd startup and ‘compliance costs’ have never been stifling; it's just more expensive to run a business here and there's far, far less funding available. That's really it.
Belgium's tax haven will make some people willing to give you 10k in post-seed. Wow. We hunted VCs for 1.5 years to negotiate one million-ish euros after showing market traction. We just aren't on the same level as the US, and that's kinda okay. Grants might work, but I mostly see grants for things that won't compete well in the current market.
AI nonsense won't make us more competitive — but hey, we'll arrive late to the bubble. We need to be building the kind of core, dependable infrastructure that would honour privacy, make us more independent. Backing off on privacy protections won't yield a mobile OS, an independent browser, better cloud options, etc.
It's just… lazy. “Slap AI on it”-level policy. Ugh.
That's also true for tax laws, labor laws, environment laws, almost every safety code out there, building zoning...
But uncertainty in compliance and time spent navigating compliance is nearly pure waste.
Not just small business, but even non-profits that just keep a list of people involved with them are subject to the same rules, even if they only use the information internally and do not buy or sell any personal information.
Its not just cookies and websites, its any personal information stored electronically.
You can still turn cookies off in your user agent though.
Smart rule making includes reducing the regulatory burden when it overreaches. The weight of regulation around tech in the EU is creating an environment such that the only companies that can operate in a space are the ones who can afford massive compliance overhead. That leaves you with the very same big tech firms that people are writing these rules to protect themselves from in the first place.
It's the same thing as any other regulation -- regulatory burden. Laws aren't code, they need interpretation. That means you need your own lawyer to tell you an interpretation that they feel they can defend in front of a judge.
There is a cost to that. In both time and money. I am the CEO of a startup who is subject to GDPR. The amount of time and money we've spent just making sure we are in compliance is quite high, and we barely operate in Europe and don't collect PII.
You can wing it and say "this looks easy, I can do this on my own!" and maybe you can. For a while. But no serious business is going to try to DIY any regulations.
Ignoring that, the other problem is enforcement. Is it not unrealistic to have a law that says “if you have a data breach you are subject to a penalty?” And “if you fail to report that breach the penalty can go as far as corporate death or executive incarceration?”
Or even more simply - replace the wrist-slapping fines with criminal charges and imprisonment.
If you design your system according to the guidelines you usually end up with a product where it's easier to service your customer (eg. with full account exports). Deleting inactive accounts is great because it means less migration headaches in the future.
This is also why our privacy statement starts with "We […] don’t really want your personal data."
We recently built a platform specifically to navigate the complex intersection of MDR (Medical Device Regulation) and the AI Act, relying on the pressure of hard deadlines. By introducing flexible timelines linked to technical standards, the EU risks signaling that compliance is a secondary concern, potentially stalling the momentum... and at this point patient safety is my biggest concern, not our platform
This introduces chaos rather than relief. Companies do not need lower standards; they need clarity.
We can compete effectively against high standards as long as the rules are clear. EU AI Act was clear. This proposal substitutes the certainty of a high bar with the confusion of a sliding scale, which may hinder the industry more than it helps :/
Imagine being a college student with 240 hours and $1,000 to release an MVP over the summer. How long would it take to read GDPR yourself, 100 hours? How much would it cost to hire a lawyer verify that your startup meets GDPR guidelines, $5,000? It would be almost impossible for any young person to start a business. GDPR was obviously a failure from the start. Anyone who couldn't see that has a child's understanding of business. Grow up.
Put together and those two basically undo the entire concept of privacy as it’s trivially easy to target someone from a large enough “anonymous” set (there is no anonymous data, there only exists data that’s not labeled with an ID yet)
Promoting degrowth is the best way to lose the race and the EU have finally admitted that they got it completely wrong.
The EU, especially the EU post 2008, seems to be infatuated with regulation it has likely bitten them with their lackluster GDP growth and their very lackluster AI developments.
I suspect that this is too little too late, and more importantly I highly doubt it signals a shift in the biases/incentives of the EU regulators. The second the scrutiny is off of them they will go back to their ways. It is their nature.
(I look forward to the loss of karma. I hope that the link to @complaintvc at least makes a few people chuckle).
You run a merch store. You want to share with your suppliers order data so that you can get the right number of sizes/colors/etc. Is this PII under GDPR rules? Technically, yes! Not only is there information on gender, but also people's height and weight and maybe even family makeup. Does it make sense to call this data sub-processing? Eh? Maybe? (To my knowledge, I don't know if any examples like this actually caught any enforcement.)
Under the new proposal, sharing this data is okay, so long as you use pseudo-anonymous identifiers (customer-1234, customer-1235). You still can't share sensitive identifiers (name, address, email, login, etc).
Obviously the elephant in the room is AI and training data. But this also simplifies a lot of the ticky-tacky areas in GDPR where PII rules are opaque and not-consistently enforced anyway.
The article claims this is because of big tech and Donald Trump. It just states that they have applied pressure. I would love to see more information on how those forces specifically are precipitating the change.
Meanwhile the EU commission claims that this is for the benefit the European tech sector.
>our companies, especially our start-ups and small businesses, are often held back by layers of rigid rules
The latter seems like the more obvious explanation and what critics said about GDPR all along.
"Well, you can say what you like but it doesn't change anything 'Cause the corridors of power, they're an ocean away"
EDIT: And you cannot share information gained by permitted collection unless EXPLICIT permission to share is granted.
[1] Eg: it's not sufficient to disclose this in equivocal text buried in 25k lines of EULA text.
The law got SO convoluted over 9 years of interpretation by the European courts that its now impossible to be 100% compliant. It now requires you to give an easy 'Accept' button to accept the listed cookies at the first pop up, but penalizes you if the user actually uses it to accept cookies because the user has to manually go through all the listed cookies and approve them by hand one by one.
So:
- If you dont provide the easy 'accept' button, you are in violation.
- If you do and the user actually clicks it, you are still in violation because you didnt make the user approve each cookie one by one
- If you give a list of cookies to the users and force the user to manually approve what he wants in the first pop up, you are still in violation because its not easy and your easy 'Accept' button is meaningless as a result
Its a sh*tty law that got more complicated over time and only helped megacorps.
People need to understand that the early days of the Pirate Party are gone and the current crop of tech-savvy politicians that remain from those days are those who made a career out of it. And like every politician who made a career out of something, the only way for those politicians to keep getting elected is by doing 'more' of what they have been doing. So they just keep bloating tech regulation to keep their career, making it difficult for everyone but the large corporations. It must also be noted that some of them sold out and are basically the tech lobbies' henchmen, pushing for American-style legislation to build regulatory moats for big corporations.
The Open Source community fought it, and thought that it won a concession, but it really was not a concession: The Eu commission will 'interpret' the law. So it will be interpreted politically - or worse, lobby-driven - with every other Eu commission that takes office.
The law does not allow you to make any kind of income from your open source project in ANY way, and basically forces you to be free labor for megacorps. Charging for support? Responsible for fines that can go up to millions of Euros. Charging for 'downloads'. Same. Licenses? Same.
It looks like this was another law pushed by Eu big software lobbies: Cripple any small player that may be a competitor by building a moat against small players and those pesky Open Source startups that may challenge your online service, but still keep Open Source developers as the free labor for your company's infrastructure.
The tech legislation landscape in the Eu has been co-opted by Eu megacorps. Like I said in another comment, we arent in the early days of the Pirate Party anymore. Now career politicians and sold-out lobbyists make laws to protect megacorps. Therefore Im against any new tech legislation from the Eu, despite having been an early Pirate Party advocate back when even using the word 'pirate' put you in legal trouble.
Europe's cookie nightmare is crumbling. EC wants preference at browser level
From Microsoft's simple overview of GDPR for startups: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/admin/securi...
> The GDPR is concerned with the following types of data:
> Personal data: If you can link data to an individual and identify them, then that data is considered personal with respect to the GDPR. Examples of personal data include name, address, date of birth, and IP address. The GDPR considers even encoded information (also known as "pseudonymous" information) to be personal data. If the encoded data can be linked to an individual, the data is considered personal, regardless of how obscure or technical the data is.
> Sensitive personal data: This data adds more details to personal data. Examples include religion, trade union membership, ethnic origin, and so on. Sensitive personal data also includes biometric data and DNA. Under GDPR, sensitive data has more stringent protection rules than personal data.
So when articles like this say "regulations are strangling small businesses", they aren't talking about the cost of compliance with unnecessary overhead, nor about being "forced" to have an unnecessary cookie banner. They're talking about being required to get consent before collecting and selling your personally identifying information. That is the regulation that's "strangling" them, and what they're aiming to change. If you don't engage in that behaviour, your small business probably isn't regulated by the GDPR in the first place.
It is particularly frustrating to see this proposed change coming after the EU finally started cracking down on cookie banner abuse in court this year. It is now being legally enforced that, if you do have a consent banner, you must have a "reject" button that is equally as prominent as the accept button, not hidden away in a sub-menu. There are still many sites that aren't compliant, but this has been a markedly huge improvement to the web experience. It was disastrously long overdue, and that was a failure on the EU's part, but it vexes me to see people frustrated with cookie banners cheering on the death of GDPR to automate data collection without consent when the actual solution was simply for the existing law to be enforced properly.
Do better, EU.
European Commission plans “digital omnibus” package to simplify its tech laws
Wait, what? So they are now mandating browsers implement this? Also, something bothers me about the conflation of regulators changing the regulation (accurate) with regulators changing the thing that resulted from the previous version of the regulation (inaccurate). They arent getting rid of the cookie banners. They are changing the underlying rules that gave rise to them. It remains to be seen what the effects of the new rules will be.
No wonder we default to Google Chrome on Microsoft/Apple systems, and American social platforms, to debate issues affecting EU citizens
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