We didn't notice that we copied your codebase, changed the name then pretended to have built it in four days?
Good grief.
We didn't notice that we copied your codebase, changed the name then pretended to have built it in four days?
Good grief.
That's an extremely charitable interpretation.
A more realistic interpretation is that the law was up to date, just that enforcement couldn't keep up because 1) nobody expected such a brazen level of breaking the law and 2) justice doesn't really apply when you have enough capital.
While I wouldn't disagree with your sentiment, just keep in mind that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) got implemented 2018.
As an aside, GDPR enforcement is so lacking (even today) it doesn't register on anyone's radar beyond those that fear-monger about it or sell snake oil to pseudo-comply with it. But even then, keep in mind most of what the GDPR has was already part of many countries' own legislation, and things like spyware were illegal even in the US (but again laws don't apply if you are a company and have enough capital).
It ended up meaning something else, but back then this is how I understood it.
At least in Germany at the time of GDPR, the startups (and also bigger companies) were struggling with the insane amount of compliance requirements, and the uncertainty how to actually interpret these legal requirements also in terms of federal law.
In other words: these (German) companies (and startups) clearly obeyed the spirit of these, as you say, 40 year old laws, but struggled hard with the formal red-tape requirements of GDPR.
* waterfall
* design up-front
* source control systems that
* defaulted all files to read-only
* required you to "check-out" files, potentially locking other devs out from editing them [1]
* probably didn't have unit tests so "deploying to prod" meant "doing a full QA pass, done by human beings"
* there was no CI/CD (We had "Build Engineers")
In this context, pushing a change to SVN/git/hg, having tests run automatically, then having CI/CD push new code to production, all as a side-effect of one engineer push a button? That was moving fast, and occasionally, breaking the whole website. But we got better tests, better CI/CD, metrics, green/blue, ... We learned it was unequivocally better than the old way.[1] Reserved Checkouts: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/clearcase/11.0.0?topic=ucm-check...
That’s not really true, every app offers some version of “Download your data” these days as a result of GDPR.
This mentality is relatively new. Or more like invented by Facebook and got marketed the heck by PRs and marketing firms.
And now we have people who code before they think.