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Comment by estsauver | Hacker News Reader

I'm really confused why they think european data protection laws are likely to be a big barrier. I think Amazon is well poised to let you choose regions for things, and unless LIDL knows something we don't, will probably be able to adapt to almost any new regulations as well or as fast as Lidl could.

I also wonder why I would trust LIDL to execute on a vital part of infrastructure for us, when they can't manage an SAP migration project...

https://www.consultancy.uk/news/18243/lidl-cancels-sap-intro...

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Both the Patriot Act and the Cloud Act apply anywhere in the world.

American companies so far have been really bad at actually complying with regulations like the GDPR - many do on the surface level, but if you're a European company that wants to do things right and not take risks on the interpretation of things like "consent", suddenly your pool of potential third-party data processors drops significantly. There's a serious cultural issue there.

> There's a serious cultural issue there.

Said "cultural issue" is the reason why the GDPR was implemented in the first place! It was not European ad-tech running wild tracking people all over the place so hard that even the notoriously slow and complex EU parliament had no choice but to act in the interest of their constituents.

Let's not kid ourselves : European ad-tech companies are not substantially more ethical than their American counterparts.

GDPR (even with its current clumsy implementation) is a much needed piece of legislation since the data processing market have no economic interest in "behaving" ethically.

I rather see them cancelling SAP as a positive sign. They seem to know what they are doing...

They cancelled their SAP integration after dropping 500 million euros...

It might be a sign they're moving in the right direction, but it also tells me they are transitioning from a board and executive team that felt that was the right path quite recently.

They tried to integrate the business into SAP for seven years. Which still is fairly recently in non-startup terms, but I agree it's still a great sign they decided to cut the losses instead of falling for the Sunk Cost Fallacy.

US companies will comply, knowingly or unknowingly, to US government requests for handing out data, no matter GDPR and data center location within EU.

Cancelling SAP is a sign that they can avoid sunk cost fallacy, which is good.

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