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Comment by dbasedweeb | Hacker News Reader

This would only matter if you’re profiting from your fetish forum, which seems unlikely. Plus you’d need to have an EU presence, otherwise who cares and who would force you? There’s nothing stopping you from ignoring GDPR in the scenarios you describe. Being a small hobby forum pretty much let’s you pretend GDPR doesn’t exist, while being the likes or FaceBook makes it impossible to ignore.

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The law is for everyone, it doesn't matter if I profit from it or how big I am, I still have to reveal who I am if I take data that is often needed, like emails in a forum.

We’ll have to se how it plays out, but I suspect if you operate a small site outside of the EU you won’t be impacted.

Of course you won’t be impacted, but your protection is via selective enforcement. You won’t be in compliance with the law, but the government will lack the resources or determination to punish you. Until that changes.

This is fundamentally dangerous. Once we are all lawbreakers all the time, it creates a powerful tool for oppression and using the law to harass and silence political opponents.

It’s not that slippery slopes don’t exist, but when the only argument against something is the supposed harm that it may lead to via a slippery slope, it’s suspicious and unconvincing. This thread is full of people saying that this is a step on the road to tyranny, and may end there, that’s true, but the arguments don’t seem to really support the claims.

If this really matters to you, and you care about doing more than signaling to others of your ideological persuasion, you need to offer more and better. Slippery slope is too often the lazy fallacy, and not a real case against something. How does this law as written and likely enforced do all of the bad things claimed here?

This is not a slippery slope argument. Situation where the only thing protecting you from unreasonable law is selective enforcement is already bad, no further sliding down the slope needed.

Selective enforcement if you’re in the EU, otherwise who is enforcing it? For the billions of us not in the EU, these arguments are weak as hell.

It is enforced no matter where in the world you are, as long as your site is accessible to EU citizens. And you will be surprised by how much jurisdiction European courts can have. A monetary judgement can be collected from any American company via UFMJRA, for example (http://www.uniformlaws.org/ActSummary.aspx?title=Foreign%20M...).

We’re not talking about a company, we’re talking about a fetish forum without a scrap of money changing hands. Who is enforcing GDPR there exactly? EU paratroopers? Not to mention that most people don’t live in the EU or America, so again, who’s enforcing this on our hypothetical non-business?

It’s really hardcore levels of bullshit being employed in this thread to make a big scary mountain out of a molehill.

The EU could legally jail you the moment you step into its territory, and that includes flights that go through Europe, even without landing.

That doesn’t sound even remotely correct given the nature of the “offense” in this case, for which the remedy is a fine. Can you cite this “jail the moment you step into its territory” thing?

Jail is a place where you're put if there is a chance that you might try to run away from a trial and its resolution. I was in jail - and I did nothing, the case was immediately dropped.

Additionally, while the remedy for this crime is a fine, the remedy for not paying the fine is prison.

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