Hacker News Reader

Comment by mgerdts | Hacker News Reader

Will I need to move to one of these countries to benefit from this, or can I just visit?

That is, how long will I have to tunnel my traffic across the pond to keep this cruft uninstalled?

> Windows uses the region chosen by the customer during device setup to identify if the PC is in the EEA. Once chosen in device setup, the region used for DMA compliance can only be changed by resetting the PC.

https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2023/11/16/preview...

So if you just choose a region in the EEA during setup can you benefit from this without any negative effects regardless of where you actually are?

I almost always select Germany when asked for my region.

I don't know what else the region choice affects.

Default language/regional formatting options, but those are easily changed.

Why not militate to your politicians and law makers to have your country also adopt consumer friendly legislation? Genuine question. I know using VPNs is a lot easier, but I feel like that's not the real long-term solution.

Most countries are not as powerful as EU. EU can do this and that customer-friendly regulation because they are a huge market that even MS and Apple cannot afford to lose.

The EU is not the only place that implement this regulation. There are about 129 more countries around the world with similar laws, but MSFT apparently does not want to obey them in the first place.

If you are from a very small country, maybe... But there's a lot of mid-sized or other big countries who just have the power and don't do any of these regulations.

Brazil basically cloned GDPR and it worked (LGPD). For example, look at this Samsung tool: https://imgur.com/a/ycgkSCI

Most people on this site are from the USA, so I would bet their legislators could do something, but choose not to.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com