I am getting quite tired of the "small businesses" argument about the GDPR. It's starting to become the "think of the children" equivalent but for data protection.
Would you also be against food safety or physical product regulations (ban of leaded solder or other toxic chemicals)? After all, those can and do affect small restaurants and other businesses as well.
In general, no! But if someone proposed that all restaurants should perform chemical analyses on random samples of their food to check for spoilage and cross-contamination, I would have very similar questions about where the taco shack down the street is supposed to find an affordable chemical lab. Making it "instant and pretty for you to look at all the data" is a large, expensive endeavor and I don't see why it's necessary to achieve the regulatory goals here.
> But if someone proposed that all restaurants should perform chemical analyses on random samples of their food
To be fair, people propose things all the time. It only becomes law when enough people agree that it is needed. That process isn't always perfect but in general it works.
The reason we don't have a "General Food Safety Regulation" is that the current situation is good enough, either because the existing regulations are sufficient or that the industry can self-regulate (as it's usually bad for business to poison your customers). As a result, in most Western countries, you can be confident that any business that sells food will not poison you.
If we suddenly had a food poisoning epidemic because all vendors were unscrupulous and selling spoiled food, I would totally be in favour of stronger regulations even if it means small taco shacks can't compete. Having to go to a farther/more expensive place that can afford such checks is a price I (and I suspect most other people) am willing to pay if it means not getting food poisoning.
The GDPR came to be because it was determined that the existing data protection regulations were inadequate and the industry demonstrated that can't be trusted to self-regulate.
I don't think comparing food safetey or toxic chemicals that hurt your health to the design, usability and accessibility of a data export is very valid. The parent argument was not about not having to export data at all. It was about how well designed it was.
The "small businesses" argument is brought up in every discussion of the GDPR including much worse transgressions than merely bad UX in the data export process. I was not exclusively referring to this particular instance.
Would you also be against food safety or physical product regulations (ban of leaded solder or other toxic chemicals)? After all, those can and do affect small restaurants and other businesses as well.