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Comment by myrandomcomment | Hacker News Reader

The simple suggestion would be that Google needs to ask for your citizenship status and go from there. Not sure else how to solve that. If I am an American living in the EU for a few years does the GDPR apply to me when I live there? I am going to the EU next week for 10 days. When I access my gmail from the EU what law applies?

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I have three western citizenships, one is EU, and I live across borders, usually accessing the internet via VPN from China. Google cannot possibly understand this, nor should it try to, rather it should give everyone the best protections guaranteed by law anywhere in the world and only punch holes in it for local regulations in specific jurisdictions where unavoidable. To do anything else (such as profiling for ads) is to be evil.

> it should give everyone the best protections guaranteed by law anywhere in the world

What do you do when laws from different countries conflict with each other?

Use infinite lawyer dollars and infrastructure capabilities to route around the problem where viable. Where impossible, preserve maximum protection outside of these exceptions.

Couldn’t they provide a way to check/edit our personal details so we can set our home address?

https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a... ... Final falsehood: Each person has exactly one address. Same goes for phone numbers, citizenships, passports, etc.

Googles job is to make money, which means monetizing your data. We have no reason to expect anything else from a free service. I fail to understand why this surprises people. If that does not work people can use another search engine (duck duck go or the like) and pay for email (proton, etc).

Its a big open question until there is precedent but the GDPR is explicit that residency and citizenship aren’t required.

Most people are taking the position that if either end of the request is in the EU or owned by an EU entity its covered.

> If I am an American living in the EU for a few years does the GDPR apply to me when I live there?

From my understanding, yes. Also if you are an EU citizen living in America, it also applies to you.

It's based on residency, not citizenship. It does not apply if you're an EU citizen living in the US.

The simple suggestion would be that Google needs to ask for your citizenship status and go from there

The simpler suggestion is that Google stop collecting and warehousing people's personal information.

That is their business model. If people do not like it then do not use Google.

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