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Comment by remus | Hacker News Reader

Because Google has to satisfy the legal requirements of the country the user is actually in.

You're missing the point. To reiterate the whole point of the article, Google is ignoring the actual residency of their users. European citizens who have merely traveled are forcibly having their accounts moved to another country with lax privacy laws. Also, in accordance with everything else they do, there's no meaningful way for users to reverse this decision.

The quote from the article makes this even more clear:

>> I got the same Mail. They want to move my account from Germany to Thailand. I’ve not been to Thailand (or anywhere else) since 2 years…

I was responding to the parent comment (which from my reading asked why users can't tell google which country they want their account to be associated with) not the article.

GDPR will apply to EU citizens living abroad, and the country they are currently in may have conflicting rules. What then? The whole idea seems like a headache.

No, they only have to satisfy the legal requirements of countries where they have established organizations. That's why GDPR was a game-changer: it made Europe-wide strong privacy regulations that were previously local to a few countries. France's CNIL has always been a farce, but at least on paper provided privacy rights... that Google was free to ignore because it was based in Ireland & such.

Of course as an Internet service you don't have to comply with every single national law there is. Would that even be possible? Of course, if a nation State believes you don't respect their laws, they are "free" to try and censor your website, as many do with The Pirate Bay, Sci Hub, etc.

> No, they only have to satisfy the legal requirements of countries where they have established organizations.

Which for Google and other companies means basically most countries, right? For example they have an office in Malaysia (https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/googles...).

If you have an office, the state will be able to seize your assets, or potentially jail your executives. This is not like Pirate Bay or Sci Hub.

The strategic significance of a given office may be small, and may well be larger to the country in which it exists than to the firm it represents.

I suspect Google would be more aggreived concerning actions taken against 1600 Ampetheater Parkway, or one of it major datacentres, than against a one-person sales front operating from a bedroom in a remote location. It might well seek to safely extract its personnel, but would have little concern with the facilities or operations it represents themselves.

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