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Let's be real here for a second, what's your definition of dramatic? I don't foresee the EU losing access to more than a handful of services, many of which as i

Let's be real here for a second, what's your definition of dramatic? I don't foresee the EU losing access to more than a handful of services, many of which as in the case above provide questionable products. As horror stories come out and geoblocking tools become easy to use, I'd say that over the next few years, the vast majority of non-EU sites will have blocked EU traffic. Nobody wants the liability unless they make a large percentage of their revenue from EU countries. Accepting such traffic means exposing your business to instant financial annihilation at the whim of a foreign government.

hluska 8y ago
I'm sorry, but that last phrase "instant financial annihilation at the whim of a foreign government" is so hyperbolic as to border on FUD. Here is a fact. If your business complied with EU data protection laws, GDPR is only an incremental step. And, here is another fact. The EU is nowhere near as litigious as the United States. GDPR may levy some intense fines at repeat offenders, particularly those who haven't been in compliance with any data security/protection law from the last twenty years. But to claim "financial annihilation at the whim of a foreign government"?? That's just poor taste.
- downandout 8y ago
  To me, $10 or $20 million would indeed be instant financial annihilation.
  - throwaway-hn123 8y ago
    Great. You've made your decision, can you get on with geoblocking the EU and stop your fucking whining, please?
- briandear 8y ago
  You hope. Any proof in the text of the law to back that up? From a risk management perspective, doing any business in the EU is dangerous because even if you are doing it right, the potential exists that you’ll have to defend GDPR claims. That’s a real liability. Of course, as I have said before, that’s probably by design since Europe, especially France, has a real inferiority complex with foreign tech. Examples: France suing Apple over developer fees. France blocking the sale of DailyMotion to Yahoo. The war against Uber with the simultaneous promotion of BlaBlaCar, the attacks against Apple for taxes on income that wasn’t even earned in France, the collective freak-out over AirBnB while subsidizing Gites de France. My point is that exposing yourself to the risk of a European money-grab is too high. Besides, who benefits from collected fines? Governments. Those fines don’t get paid to the aggrieved party, they get paid to the government. Governments have an incentive to levy fines on foreign companies, with very little downside — European jobs aren’t at risk. The attack surface is just too great to be using “hope” as a strategy.
  - hluska 8y ago
    Sure. Read sections 58 and 83 of the GDPR. http://www.privacy-regulation.eu/en/article-83-general-conditions-for-imposing-administrative-fines-GDPR.htm http://www.privacy-regulation.eu/en/article-83-general-condi... http://www.privacy-regulation.eu/en/article-58-powers-GDPR.htm http://www.privacy-regulation.eu/en/article-58-powers-GDPR.h... Section 58 is about EU powers under the GDPR. Section 83 gets into the spirit and purpose of fines levied. Being overly punitive would only invite judicial oversight.
- Karunamon 8y ago
  Relying on the personal whims of regulators over how hard they get to smack you does not immediately seem to me like a good way to run a business. The only thing that matters here at the end of the day is what the law actually provides for, and it provides for some scariness.
- soneil 8y ago
  I think that's why you hear more concern about this from the US, than you do from the EU. They're not contrasting the two legal cultures, and just expecting the EU to act like the US would.
- tripletao 8y ago
  > But to claim "financial annihilation at the whim of a foreign government"?? That's just poor taste. Then let's say "financial annihilation at the discretion of a foreign government"? I don't see how you can deny that the GDPR gives them that discretion, unconstrained by statute (though constrained by a judge's fuzzy standards of reasonableness). You're saying that they will use that discretion reasonably. You're probably right; but why do they need it in the first place? Like, why is 20M EUR the right number here? Why not 10M or 40M? Or are you sufficiently confident in your regulators' discretion that you don't think the numbers matter? That's great, but it's not the rule of law. I think two classes of business will block the EU: those with business models fundamentally incompatible with the GDPR (like unroll.me, I suspect), and those with compatible models that consider their EU business too small to justify the risk. I feel no sadness for the former, but the latter seems to me like real damage. It could easily have been avoided with proportionate fines. Why do you think they didn't do that?
  - hluska 8y ago
    You're right about the 20M euros. I can't imagine where that number comes from and I don't like anything arbitrary about law. However, I still don't agree that foreign governments can operate unconstrained by statute. Again, I'll point you to article 83 of the GDPR. It starts off with some vague statement about how supervising authorities need to make sure that fines are effective, proportionate and dissuasive. That's bullshit, but if you read further, they add quite a bit more substance to the argument. I've just been linking to article 83, but it's likely worth quoting once in this thread. Part of it reads: --- When deciding whether to impose an administrative fine and deciding on the amount of the administrative fine in each individual case due regard shall be given to the following: (a) the nature, gravity and duration of the infringement taking into account the nature scope or purpose of the processing concerned as well as the number of data subjects affected and the level of damage suffered by them; (b) the intentional or negligent character of the infringement; (c) any action taken by the controller or processor to mitigate the damage suffered by data subjects; (d) the degree of responsibility of the controller or processor taking into account technical and organisational measures implemented by them pursuant to Articles 25 and 32; (e) any relevant previous infringements by the controller or processor; (f) the degree of cooperation with the supervisory authority, in order to remedy the infringement and mitigate the possible adverse effects of the infringement; (g) the categories of personal data affected by the infringement; (h) the manner in which the infringement became known to the supervisory authority, in particular whether, and if so to what extent, the controller or processor notified the infringement; (i) where measures referred to in Article 58(2) have previously been ordered against the controller or processor concerned with regard to the same subject-matter, compliance with those measures; (j) adherence to approved codes of conduct pursuant to Article 40 or approved certification mechanisms pursuant to Article 42; and (k) any other aggravating or mitigating factor applicable to the circumstances of the case, such as financial benefits gained, or losses avoided, directly or indirectly, from the infringement. (source - http://www.privacy-regulation.eu/en/article-83-general-conditions-for-imposing-administrative-fines-GDPR.htm http://www.privacy-regulation.eu/en/article-83-general-condi...) --- Also, consider that GDPR isn't a huge change over existing EU privacy legislation. The scariest change in GDPR is that it gives the European Union tools to force non-European companies to comply. While that is scary, if a non-European company has been showing a good faith effort to comply with existing EU privacy protections, they shouldn't have much to fear unless something fucked up happens. To summarize my position, if a company is already complying with EU privacy law, they don't have much to fear. If a company is not complying with EU privacy law, they have a problem, but seeing as how the first draft of GDPR came out almost six years ago I don't feel particularly bad for them. And finally, if a company was found not to be in compliance, it would be hard to justify the maximum fines if they were showing a good faith effort to become compliant. The wildcard here would be what would happen if a popular company suffered a massive data breach. Consider for example, the time that LinkedIn accidentally lost a whole bunch of unhashed passwords. On one hand, that's a massive breach, LinkedIn did a very poor job as data stewards and it's a perfect opportunity for a maximum fine. On the other hand, what would be the political ramifications? And where would liability flow?

hluska 8y ago

I'm sorry, but that last phrase "instant financial annihilation at the whim of a foreign government" is so hyperbolic as to border on FUD. Here is a fact. If your business complied with EU data protection laws, GDPR is only an incremental step. And, here is another fact. The EU is nowhere near as litigious as the United States. GDPR may levy some intense fines at repeat offenders, particularly those who haven't been in compliance with any data security/protection law from the last twenty years. But to claim "financial annihilation at the whim of a foreign government"?? That's just poor taste.

downandout 8y ago
To me, $10 or $20 million would indeed be instant financial annihilation.
- throwaway-hn123 8y ago
  Great. You've made your decision, can you get on with geoblocking the EU and stop your fucking whining, please?
briandear 8y ago
You hope. Any proof in the text of the law to back that up? From a risk management perspective, doing any business in the EU is dangerous because even if you are doing it right, the potential exists that you’ll have to defend GDPR claims. That’s a real liability. Of course, as I have said before, that’s probably by design since Europe, especially France, has a real inferiority complex with foreign tech. Examples: France suing Apple over developer fees. France blocking the sale of DailyMotion to Yahoo. The war against Uber with the simultaneous promotion of BlaBlaCar, the attacks against Apple for taxes on income that wasn’t even earned in France, the collective freak-out over AirBnB while subsidizing Gites de France. My point is that exposing yourself to the risk of a European money-grab is too high. Besides, who benefits from collected fines? Governments. Those fines don’t get paid to the aggrieved party, they get paid to the government. Governments have an incentive to levy fines on foreign companies, with very little downside — European jobs aren’t at risk. The attack surface is just too great to be using “hope” as a strategy.
- hluska 8y ago
  Sure. Read sections 58 and 83 of the GDPR. http://www.privacy-regulation.eu/en/article-83-general-conditions-for-imposing-administrative-fines-GDPR.htm http://www.privacy-regulation.eu/en/article-83-general-condi... http://www.privacy-regulation.eu/en/article-58-powers-GDPR.htm http://www.privacy-regulation.eu/en/article-58-powers-GDPR.h... Section 58 is about EU powers under the GDPR. Section 83 gets into the spirit and purpose of fines levied. Being overly punitive would only invite judicial oversight.
Karunamon 8y ago
Relying on the personal whims of regulators over how hard they get to smack you does not immediately seem to me like a good way to run a business. The only thing that matters here at the end of the day is what the law actually provides for, and it provides for some scariness.
soneil 8y ago
I think that's why you hear more concern about this from the US, than you do from the EU. They're not contrasting the two legal cultures, and just expecting the EU to act like the US would.
tripletao 8y ago
> But to claim "financial annihilation at the whim of a foreign government"?? That's just poor taste. Then let's say "financial annihilation at the discretion of a foreign government"? I don't see how you can deny that the GDPR gives them that discretion, unconstrained by statute (though constrained by a judge's fuzzy standards of reasonableness). You're saying that they will use that discretion reasonably. You're probably right; but why do they need it in the first place? Like, why is 20M EUR the right number here? Why not 10M or 40M? Or are you sufficiently confident in your regulators' discretion that you don't think the numbers matter? That's great, but it's not the rule of law. I think two classes of business will block the EU: those with business models fundamentally incompatible with the GDPR (like unroll.me, I suspect), and those with compatible models that consider their EU business too small to justify the risk. I feel no sadness for the former, but the latter seems to me like real damage. It could easily have been avoided with proportionate fines. Why do you think they didn't do that?
- hluska 8y ago
  You're right about the 20M euros. I can't imagine where that number comes from and I don't like anything arbitrary about law. However, I still don't agree that foreign governments can operate unconstrained by statute. Again, I'll point you to article 83 of the GDPR. It starts off with some vague statement about how supervising authorities need to make sure that fines are effective, proportionate and dissuasive. That's bullshit, but if you read further, they add quite a bit more substance to the argument. I've just been linking to article 83, but it's likely worth quoting once in this thread. Part of it reads: --- When deciding whether to impose an administrative fine and deciding on the amount of the administrative fine in each individual case due regard shall be given to the following: (a) the nature, gravity and duration of the infringement taking into account the nature scope or purpose of the processing concerned as well as the number of data subjects affected and the level of damage suffered by them; (b) the intentional or negligent character of the infringement; (c) any action taken by the controller or processor to mitigate the damage suffered by data subjects; (d) the degree of responsibility of the controller or processor taking into account technical and organisational measures implemented by them pursuant to Articles 25 and 32; (e) any relevant previous infringements by the controller or processor; (f) the degree of cooperation with the supervisory authority, in order to remedy the infringement and mitigate the possible adverse effects of the infringement; (g) the categories of personal data affected by the infringement; (h) the manner in which the infringement became known to the supervisory authority, in particular whether, and if so to what extent, the controller or processor notified the infringement; (i) where measures referred to in Article 58(2) have previously been ordered against the controller or processor concerned with regard to the same subject-matter, compliance with those measures; (j) adherence to approved codes of conduct pursuant to Article 40 or approved certification mechanisms pursuant to Article 42; and (k) any other aggravating or mitigating factor applicable to the circumstances of the case, such as financial benefits gained, or losses avoided, directly or indirectly, from the infringement. (source - http://www.privacy-regulation.eu/en/article-83-general-conditions-for-imposing-administrative-fines-GDPR.htm http://www.privacy-regulation.eu/en/article-83-general-condi...) --- Also, consider that GDPR isn't a huge change over existing EU privacy legislation. The scariest change in GDPR is that it gives the European Union tools to force non-European companies to comply. While that is scary, if a non-European company has been showing a good faith effort to comply with existing EU privacy protections, they shouldn't have much to fear unless something fucked up happens. To summarize my position, if a company is already complying with EU privacy law, they don't have much to fear. If a company is not complying with EU privacy law, they have a problem, but seeing as how the first draft of GDPR came out almost six years ago I don't feel particularly bad for them. And finally, if a company was found not to be in compliance, it would be hard to justify the maximum fines if they were showing a good faith effort to become compliant. The wildcard here would be what would happen if a popular company suffered a massive data breach. Consider for example, the time that LinkedIn accidentally lost a whole bunch of unhashed passwords. On one hand, that's a massive breach, LinkedIn did a very poor job as data stewards and it's a perfect opportunity for a maximum fine. On the other hand, what would be the political ramifications? And where would liability flow?