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De minimis non curat lex - the law does not deal in trifles. Unless a multi-millionaire pharmaceutical businessman wants to make life difficult for someone, apparently.

It's silly to see the law chewing up so much time and talent for a prosecution so at odds with the public interest.

Not per se, no. But there are many overbearing/controlling parents out there. It's easy to imagine scenarios where parental access to GDPR data could be a bad thing (and yet other scenarios where it could be a good thing).

Yeah, caught this on Fox News tonight, and the hypocrisy of their breathless hand-wringing about the "threat to democracy" really burned me up. Not because they're right wing, but because they coordinate a top-down propaganda machine and have spurred other news organizations (like MSNBC) to do the same. The magnitude of their crime and the devastating rifts it has helped widen in our country is so much greater in scope than what the Google employees were talking about doing.

Wilson reminds me somewhat of right-to-die advocate Dr. Kevorkian, in that the passion of his advocacy eventually led him to cross some bright red lines. Kevorkian assisted several chronically-ill patients with their suicides, and juries repeatedly let him off the hook because of the patients' videotaped testimonials expressing their suffering and desire to control how they died. Eventually, though, Jack took it to far and injected a patient himself (instead of waiting for them to push the button), and got sent to prison at age 70.

Maybe the lines weren't quite so bright red with Williams, but that pushing and pushing to the point where you lose sight of the bigger picture seems characteristic of many "solo" advocates (expanding the word "solo" to include not just loners but maybe also founders of non-profits who don't give up the leadership reigns, like Stallman at FSF).

By contrast, really great advocates can look beyond their cause and keep the wider world in perspective. Nelson Mandela is a good example of this (since he focused on uniting post-apartheid South Africa instead of seeking vengeance on the White gentry like his wife and many others wanted to do).