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Comment by g_p | Hacker News Reader

In which case, it sounds like at the moment they carry out a "data processing operation" to make your data public, you would have standing to make a formal complaint to your local data protection authority.

Article 18 restriction of processing can apply here. Art. 25 "Data protection by design and by default" would seem to be relevant as well. The section I alluded to above is the latter half of 25(2), saying "In particular, such measures shall ensure that by default personal data are not made accessible without the individual’s intervention to an indefinite number of natural persons."

There's also the question of whether their consent or other grounds of processing suffice, which likely wouldn't for making anything public, but Article 25 makes it clear enough anyway this is illegal.

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I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice but ... I don’t think the European government has legal standing to fine triplebyte. Triplebyte doesn’t have offices, employees or customers in Europe.

A European visiting the US and interacting with an American business does so under the protection of US law, not EU law. This is complicated in the case of Facebook and google because they also do business in Europe, so European courts can fine their European branch offices. But Triplebyte has no such EU presence that the European courts could pursue. And they don’t advertise European jobs. I suspect an EU citizen interacts with triplebyte legally the same way they would if they went to a cafe in SF while on vacation.

The opposite would be crazy. If triplebyte can be fined by the EU, that would also mean the government of Australia or China or Russia could arbitrarily levy fines against any US company if one of their citizens interacted with a US website one time. And everyone would put geo blocks on their websites to protect from liability.

This may be true, but I have had US websites flat out refuse me access because they detect I'm in Europe.

Triplebyte can be 100% fined by EU, there are such previous cases where HQ is out of EU but they are serving EU citizens.

GDPR is very clear in wording that it doesn’t matter whether company has offices in EU or not, only thing that matters is if company is providing services to EU citizens.

Triplebyte can just forward those fines to the circular file. There is no practical method of enforcement unless they have a physical EU presence.

That's not correct. You can pursue damages outside of your jurisdiction through a process called "domestication". Generally speaking US courts will enforce judgements from other countries with a legitimate legal system.

Sure, they "can." But has it ever happened with GDPR? My gut tells me they'll direct their efforts towards more critical matters.

Not a lawyer, not legal advice either, but the GDPR approach to extraterritoriality is somewhat interesting. The presence of offices or employees isn't a strict requirement by law. The law, as written, would seem to apply to a US entity serving EU customers. But international law probably wouldn't facilitate doing anything about that.

Of course there is a question about how you could enforce such a ruling. And if it can't be enforced, is it really a sanction? I guess if countries wanted to take this really seriously, they could get a list of company officers and put immigration flags on those individuals, and hold them temporarily upon trying to enter that country, until the matter was resolved. But that would be rather extreme, and you do raise some good points around which countries can fine the companies of other countries.

CCPA from California seems to have some cross-border implications as well - perhaps we will finally see a framework for privacy laws that works better than today's hotch-potch?

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