
European data protection ruling could impact Facebook and Google - fahimulhaq
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/oct/02/landmark-ecj-data-protection-ruling-facebook-google-weltimmo
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AdmiralACK
Relevant:

"The ECJ ruled* Thursday that if a company operates a service in the native
language of a country, and has representatives in that country, then it can be
held accountable by the country’s national data protection agency despite not
being headquartered in the country."

*[http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf;jsessioni...](http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf;jsessionid=9ea7d2dc30ddaeee4666aaf8474e8ec3817bab8f982e.e34KaxiLc3qMb40Rch0SaxuRb3j0?text=&docid=168944&pageIndex=0&doclang=en&mode=req&dir=&occ=first&part=1&cid=305205)

I think this is great news.

~~~
drivingmenuts
That could work both for and against companies, though.

It's certainly possible to provide a site in the native language of a country
without having a presence in that country, especially if the language in the
target country is similar (ie., US and UK).

Authority might try to block the site, but that is pretty difficult without
building a Great Wall of some sort.

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patrickaljord
What's the use of having a free and open market in the EU if you'll have to
deal with the same legislation headaches across countries anyway? That and the
fact that many countries want to reform the Schengen open immigration
agreements tells me that protectionism is making a come back inside of the EU.
Very sad. And of course, it's being used to harass foreign companies. Instead
of making the Union more business friendly for tech companies to compete
against SV, they do this, plus the VAT thing hell they voted last year, not to
forget the ridiculous cookies thingy and the "right to be forgotten". The EU
is on a roll.

~~~
duncanawoods
Here is one way to look at it:

The tech\corporate\spy world is moving so fast that we need experimentation at
smaller scales to discover the right types of privacy and information law.
Implementation of "right to be forgotten" on a small scale might have helped
find a better implementation before being rolled out at a broad scale.
Delegating law making to states lets this experimentation and evolution
happen. You can add you own start-up metaphor.

If I look at the US, the federal level seems to be a quagmire and prevent
progress (health, education, guns) compared to the rest of the world. However,
when states set law independently, the rate of change seems much faster (gay
marriage, drug laws). I can't see the US minting a new citizen right at the
expense of corporations at the federal level - this is tragic. However, it
might if states led the way first.

"Business friendly" and "protectionism" read like talking points from a
corporate PR machine. I see the EU pursuing citizen's rights for the modern
world when the US is stagnant / regressing.

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Animats
From the actual ruling: _" Weltimmo, a company registered in Slovakia, runs a
property dealing website concerning Hungarian properties. For that purpose, it
processes the personal data of the advertisers. The advertisements are free of
charge for one month but thereafter a fee is payable. Many advertisers sent a
request by e-mail for the deletion of both their advertisements and their
personal data as from that period. However, Weltimmo did not delete those data
and charged the interested parties for the price of its services. As the
amounts charged were not paid, Weltimmo forwarded the personal data of the
advertisers concerned to debt collection agencies._" In other words, a typical
slimeball-type refusal-to-cancel scam.

This was an action which fell under the European Privacy Directive, which is
EC-wide but implemented by different laws in different countries. All
countries involved are EC countries.

This sort of thing comes up all the time in the US, where courts have to deal
with companies from another state.

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mtgx
We can only hope. It wouldn't be a very good or strong law if it _didn 't_
impact Facebook or Google in a significant way, considering all the freedoms
the companies as well as the US government have taken with Europeans' data
lately.

