Comment by Jason_Genova | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jason_Genova | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Wow I just checked the thread, most seem to be "online memesters" but there also seem to be some really bad people on there. I didn't understand the nature of the site. I'll remove my opening post - thanks for pointing this out.

However, the fact that NZ police are looking for personal information of the site members, especially since the site is hosted outside NZ and by a non-NZ citizen still doesn't sit well with me.

>If that maintainer of that site is serving content to New Zealand, that it seems reasonable that he should be beholden to NZ laws.

On what planet is this reasonable? If I set up a website accessible to the world, I should be beholden to the laws of all the lands? Am I misinterpreting?

depending on the scale of your operations, absolutely yes. This already exists in most nations specifically for eCommerce websites once they're earning more than a set amount from direct sales in that region.

Should Facebook, a company who profits by directly selling the data of the population, not be beholden to the laws that govern the people who's data they're selling?

Once a company is profiting from a certain number of people within in a given region, it seems reasonable for them to then be beholden to the laws that govern the people in that region. Otherwise it's too easy to skirt the legal system of a given country.

I don't know the size of the company in the original comment, so it's possible that they're not at that threshold with regards to the NZ population they serve, but companies like facebook and google are. It seems to reasonable to expect there offerings within NZ to comply with NZ law. Equally other websites should as well once they reach the given threshold (where-ever that is set).

I'm unclear on why the police, in the course on investigating a terrorist attack, asking for information about people who may be associated with the attacker (who was a non-national of the country he attacked) who are non-nationals themselves, would make you uncomfortable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com