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Comment by rzwitserloot | Hacker News Reader

Well, the EU basically says that if you store data on people who fall under EU law, you're doing business in the EU.

This doesn't sound crazy to me.

If I'm in europe and I sell to an american, I have to adhere to certain US laws just the same. I have to fill in a W8-BEN form or whatnot.

I can elect not to, but next time I'm in the US, things might get awkward at customs. Also, my customers might be fined or more or less 'ordered' not to do business with me. That's within the US's right.

That's just how it works. Everywhere. For all countries.

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> Can you name a conflict?

GDPR (EU Law) requires companies to delete private data upon request.

SOX (US Law) requires companies do not delete private data, in case the government wants to investigate those companies later on.

SOX has existed since 2002. Did the EU lawmakers even consider this when crafting GDPR? I'm betting not, considering the damage they've done to the WHOIS system as well.

This kind of fallout is the result of poor planning and pushing incomplete legislation for political purposes and I think all of us realize that, so let's not pretend otherwise.

GDPR is pretty clear that a users “right to be forgotten” isn’t absolute and that businesses should be weighing up (and documenting) a users right to privacy against their other legal obligations.

So the GDPR actually CANT protect people, and it is murdering businesses and thereby taking food and shelter away from people.

That is literally a disaster. I wonder if this kind of thing is why the EU is crumbling.

Well, european countries usually didn't shy away from bureaucracy. Now that there is the EU, there is another big layer of bureaucracy, and it doesn't help at all. Even worse is the fact that these bureaucrats are really distant from the people, both physically and with their hearts. We are still going on because we're wasting the capital we accumulated in hundreds of years, otherwise we would have succumbed long time ago. Of course, this is a summary of my political analysis, I don't pretend to know the truth or really anything. Don't want to offend people with my opinion.

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