>Because unless you like having other people's trash on your lawn, a simple tit-for-tat strategy in game theory would suggest that it's in your best interest to not do that yourself either.

That's why company's trash the commons instead of someone's direct property, and then zealously guard their property rights. With actual trash it's dumping into a river instead of a front yard. With personal data they spend millions to suck up and infer personal data and then spend more millions guarding all of their information with lawyers crafting NDAs, obfuscateing their information with accounting tricks, and suing people or trying to bring criminal charges against people who gain access to their information.

When a company puts a secret tracking pixel on a website that users don't know about, it's good business. When an individual puts a secret program in an email the company doesn't know about, that's hacking and they need to go to jail.

>Because in a developed free market economy, that business strategy is doomed to fail, since your workers can choose to go work somewhere else that has more favorable conditions, and will likely warn any potential future workers against working for you

I'm not sure you know what enslave means. People wouldn't be allowed to leave.

To the rest of your point there, the argument that, "the market will respond to people's preferences" doesn't work with such one sided information. Sure people are leaving Facebook, but to go where? Instagram, another Facebook property that steals data? Snapchat, a different company this time but still stealing data. Cambridge Analytical has had to close up shop due to outrage, so they just reopened under another name so that most people will be unaware. Same with Blackwater -> Xi -> Academi. The entire Industry is engaging in these tactics and only dealing with the cost of renaming or a PR push because it is so lucrative. The GPDR is the EU's attempts to make it not lucrative anymore and allow for other business models to now be viable because they don't have to deal with shitty companies making a ton of money off of stealing data from people.

>Because not paying taxes will get you jail time and/or non-trivial fines in pretty much every country you could possibly be based out of.

And now not following the GPDR will get you serious fines followed by jail time if you continually flaunt the regulators. Literally everytime you said "pay taxes" in that paragraph could have been replaced with "comply with GPDR" and it would have been just as accurate

>This argument is moot because it doesn't logically follow that not complying with the GDPR necessarily produces these "negative externalities" that you're referring to.

It's not moot. Even if you don't sell the data, you are creating a pool of user data that is valuable to steal, and the constant stream of breaches from companies ranging to startups to enterprise is evidence that security is extremely difficult if not impossible. Look at the Equifax breach. They didn't have to sell any of that data for the breach to have caused actual damages to both users who had done business with them, and people who had never even entered into an agreement with Equifax. That is a negative externality generated entirely by the company.

The GPDR allows individuals to now say, "no I don't trust you to hold my data".

>I agree that that's what it's trying to do. Unfortunately, it seems like it might be having some unintended consequences along the way regardless.

Everything humans do has unintended consequences, that's a feature of not being omniscient, but using that as an argument for not trying something like the GPDR is disenguous.

If this was the governments first warning shot against data collection companies I'd probably be in the camp that thought it was going to far. It's not though, there was the cookie law, the DPD, and warnings from the government. The corporations have ignored the intent of all of them and gone on with business as usual. So now that trying a weaker form of regulation has already been done and failed the options are to let companies continue as usual and continue to harm society, or create a regulation that has actual teeth to it and starting doing a governments job of protecting it's people. Everyomes entitled to their opinion, but I am firmly in the camp of actually forcing companies into stopping this practice