Comment by Maarten88 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Maarten88 | Hacker News Reader

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As a European, the situation is only slightly better for me. Formally I have some rights, and some things that are legal in the US may be illegal here, but that has not kept any company from doing it anyway. I have yet to receive better privacy in real terms, and hope GDPR will finally make the mass intrusions unprofitable, maybe even criminal.

There was the Bye Bye Facebook event here yesterday, 10k people from the Netherlands deleted their Facebook accounts.

Personally I'm waiting until may 25 to do this: I hope that after that date, Facebook will be legally required to really delete my data, and be liable if they don't. I'm afraid that before that date, they'll just hide that data from me, and continue adding to it by tracking, and continue selling it to advertisers outside the Facebook site.

Facebook and others will be legally required to put in a reasonable effort to delete data they don't have any overriding obligation (public health, legal proceedings, other public interest, etc.) or business need to keep.

This might turn out to be different from what a random person on the street might expect.

Can we just change our info to say we're residing in some protected part of Europe? I've already gone in and falsified all of the good stuff, it wouldn't hurt to 'move' again if it means they have to apply an extra layer of privacy/right to forget.

Under GDPR, entities are allowed to ask you to prove your identity and by implication that you actually qualify for rights under GDPR.

Thanks for that tidbit. It would be nice to be grandfathered in, I can see it being a huge PITA to ask millions of people for proof--which probably gives them even more sensitive data like a photo of an ID. I assume your privacy laws travel with you, so if you travel to/login from the US your privacy rights stay the same?

What kind of grandfather clause do you imagine? The law basically says that companies are allowed to make you prove it's your data you're trying to delete to deter people using it to delete that of others. They're also allowed to refuse or charge a reasonable fee if they can justify that the request is spurious, unduly burdensome, onerous, etc.

Yes, but obviously you've got nothing if you use an US-based service from the US. It's based around companies subject to EU laws, rather than any real notion of citizenship.

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