Twitter Is Being Formally Investigated Following a GDPR Complaint | Hacker News Reader

Twitter Is Being Formally Investigated Following a GDPR Complaint

fortune.com

37 pointsoctosphere11 comments

There's an additional delicious irony here. These companies have headquartered themselves in Ireland for tax dodging purposes. Carefully legal through loop holes, but tax dodging. Except they must still abide by the law of the place their tax shelter is. Which means GDPR compliance. I have no sympathy for Twitter here.

"These companies have headquartered themselves in Ireland"

According to Twitter's most recent 10-Q, filed with the SEC:

- The company is registered in Delaware

- The principal place of business is on California

If the parent company is registered in Delaware, and its stated principal place of business is Market Street, how can it be headquartered in Ireland for corporation tax purposes?

“Twitter International Company” has its headquarters in Dublin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter:

”In 2015, following an updated terms of service and privacy policy, Twitter users outside of the United States are legally served by the Ireland-based Twitter International Company instead of Twitter, Inc. The change made these users subject to Irish and European Union data protection laws”

Amusingly, I can’t actually read this article because Fortune’s website isn’t actually GDPR compliant - there’s an interstitial with no way of either opting into or opting out of data processing.

https://outline.com/yqTM7J

GDPR-noob/American question: how does that violate GDPR?

As I understand it, you need to provide a functional way to opt out of tracking, and access to a service must not be blocked if you do not opt into the tracking. There's a bunch of other stuff (i.e. if you request the data a website has on you they have to hand it over, and if you request your information be deleted they have to actually do it within reason) but that's the gist of it.

Naturally, this results in a bunch of sites geoblocking European users- why would any sane person or company spend server time on people who can no longer legally pay you for accessing it?

But then again, protectionism is one of the two main goals of GDPR (the idea is that EU folks will be forced to read European sources that follow EU law); the other is getting American tech companies to pay their taxes in a way they can't just dodge by moving to Ireland.

Privacy's just the fig leaf over it all- while it's a nice side-effect of the law it most certainly was not the primary goal.

Believe it or not, you can display adverts without processing personal information. Magazines, TV, billboard companies, do it all the time.

So he wants Twitter to tell him every single link he's ever clicked on.

This seems like someone intent on finding something to complain about. An annoying effect of GDPR.

>The company refused to hand over the data it recorded when Veale clicked on links in other people’s tweets, claiming that providing this information would take a disproportionate effort

He's asking Twitter for what additional data Twitter stores in response to clicking on Twitter-shortened links. This is perfectly in line with the spirit of GDPR. That said, we're going to have a long road and huge mess as a result of the ambiguity that exists at so many levels and there will be lots of legal tests.

FWIW, I led the GDPR compliance effort for a SAAS product and our strategy was mostly to stop storing or processing anything we didn't absolutely need AND to make sure we could generate necessary audits to provide that information in response to customer inquiries. Here, it sounds like Twitter dropped the ball or didn't go through the effort to be compliant.

Simple. Don’t track. Figure out another business model. Or die off.

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