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Comment by fuscy | Hacker News Reader

This is not related to business but there's a horror story with Romania (it's in the EU) asking a news organization to provide informants information related to some corruption leaks.

The information is requested by the national GDPR enforcer so it bypasses the prevention written in the GDPR about news leaks.

Now there's a trial going around with this which blocked any further spread of that information until it's solved. It can be easily seen how the GDPR can be weaponized.

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Isn't that just straight abuse of the law? AFAIK GDPR only protects your personal information, it can't be used to request someone else's personal information (if anything, you could argue that GDPR prevents you from giving out another person's info).

Potentual for abuse of laws is one of the concerns people have about laws.

They aren't actually following the letter of the law, so to me it's unclear how much they actually abuse the law rather than simply pasting the GDPR logo in one corner in a sort of legal phishing attempt.

It's a concern people have about governments.

This isn't the police or the parliament asking for the information. It's the regulatory body that does inspections to companies to see if they respect GDPR.

So the pretext they're using is that they want to see the information to make sure that the news organisation is not selling it or mishandling it to other third parties. In the process, they'll be able to get the information and maybe it will go to the people involved in the corruption charges (which is the head of one part of the Parliament).

wouldn't any other regulatory body be able to ask that data to check, for example, if they are doing _anything illegal_ with that data?

For example, can't you check for all data to verify that the business is not doing anything with forbidden individuals or countries? (think OFAC)

I don't think GDPR allows anything more than any other law.

The subjects of the injunction can likely refuse and appeal to the European Court of Justice, which exists precisely to sort out these situations.

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