If there is any remaining problem it is that the rules are not enforced strictly enough on tech giants.
An indie dev in New York does not care about the GDPR. The just build cool shit and put it online. Look at all the Show HNs here.
In the EU, the situation is very different. Indie devs are super afraid and work hard to make their stuff less useful to please the GDPR.
Now about larger players:
EU companies agonize their worldwide users with cookie banners. Because that is what the GDPR tells them to do.
Non EU companies dont do that. Because why should they? Will a lone Italian traveller in the USA sue them for using Google fonts? Probably not. And if they do - they can handle it. So they only agonize their EU users with cookie banners.
That is it - as a startup, GDPR is not a massive prohlem. You know what is a real problem? The fact that you can raise 10x more investment in the US with the same slide deck.
If your business model depends on creating undesirable externalities for your "users" then you don't have my sympathy. The only shame is that we still need to enforce GDPR properly on large players, but that's a political and social thing, not per se a problem with the law itself.
And the oh so horrible cookie banners: the solution would be to not track people. If you aren't fully acting in the users interest, the cookie banner is easy to implement, or maybe not even required. So whenever you are annoyed by a cookie banner, it should be directed at the company, not the law.
If your app is literally about self quantification and the user pays you to collect that data and keep it private? You might not even need to state it anywhere, although the safe thing is of course to list all the ways you do or do not collect data.
If your app is about self quantification and you monetize by selling user data or its aggregates... GDPR. If you use a third party data provider instead of hosting the data yourself: GDPR etc. Because user data might not be important to you, but it is to your users, so you probably shouldn't be allowed to YOLO handling it
