European data protection ruling could impact Facebook and Google | Hacker News Reader

European data protection ruling could impact Facebook and Google

theguardian.com

20 pointsfahimulhaq8 comments

Relevant:

"The ECJ ruled* Thursday that if a company operates a service in the native language of a country, and has representatives in that country, then it can be held accountable by the country’s national data protection agency despite not being headquartered in the country."

*http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf;jsessioni...

I think this is great news.

That could work both for and against companies, though.

It's certainly possible to provide a site in the native language of a country without having a presence in that country, especially if the language in the target country is similar (ie., US and UK).

Authority might try to block the site, but that is pretty difficult without building a Great Wall of some sort.

Held accountable how? Arresting the representatives? Sounds like a recipe for really serious problems.

But then isn't this the same ECJ that invented the right to be forgotten?

What's the use of having a free and open market in the EU if you'll have to deal with the same legislation headaches across countries anyway? That and the fact that many countries want to reform the Schengen open immigration agreements tells me that protectionism is making a come back inside of the EU. Very sad. And of course, it's being used to harass foreign companies. Instead of making the Union more business friendly for tech companies to compete against SV, they do this, plus the VAT thing hell they voted last year, not to forget the ridiculous cookies thingy and the "right to be forgotten". The EU is on a roll.

Well before we had import tax, customs, border control, different currencies... It might not be perfect, but it's a lot better then it used to be.

Here is one way to look at it:

The tech\corporate\spy world is moving so fast that we need experimentation at smaller scales to discover the right types of privacy and information law. Implementation of "right to be forgotten" on a small scale might have helped find a better implementation before being rolled out at a broad scale. Delegating law making to states lets this experimentation and evolution happen. You can add you own start-up metaphor.

If I look at the US, the federal level seems to be a quagmire and prevent progress (health, education, guns) compared to the rest of the world. However, when states set law independently, the rate of change seems much faster (gay marriage, drug laws). I can't see the US minting a new citizen right at the expense of corporations at the federal level - this is tragic. However, it might if states led the way first.

"Business friendly" and "protectionism" read like talking points from a corporate PR machine. I see the EU pursuing citizen's rights for the modern world when the US is stagnant / regressing.

From the actual ruling: "Weltimmo, a company registered in Slovakia, runs a property dealing website concerning Hungarian properties. For that purpose, it processes the personal data of the advertisers. The advertisements are free of charge for one month but thereafter a fee is payable. Many advertisers sent a request by e-mail for the deletion of both their advertisements and their personal data as from that period. However, Weltimmo did not delete those data and charged the interested parties for the price of its services. As the amounts charged were not paid, Weltimmo forwarded the personal data of the advertisers concerned to debt collection agencies." In other words, a typical slimeball-type refusal-to-cancel scam.

This was an action which fell under the European Privacy Directive, which is EC-wide but implemented by different laws in different countries. All countries involved are EC countries.

This sort of thing comes up all the time in the US, where courts have to deal with companies from another state.

We can only hope. It wouldn't be a very good or strong law if it didn't impact Facebook or Google in a significant way, considering all the freedoms the companies as well as the US government have taken with Europeans' data lately.

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