Item — HN Reader

Sure they can. GDPR article 2 (2) says:

«This Regulation applies to the processing of personal data of data subjects who are in the Union by a controller or processor not established in the Union, where the processing activities are related to: (a) the offering of goods or services, irrespective of whether a payment of the data subject is required, to such data subjects in the Union;»

So the GDPR applies. The EU can of course sanction violators outside, but given the current political climate it is likely to be more difficult than before.

1 comments

>Sure they can. GDPR article 2 (2) says:

No they can't. That says only about where the law applies, it doesn't say about prosecution of entities not residing in the EU. EU's legal arm can't extent outside the boarders of the EU, without an outright military invasion, it's toothless to foreign entities.

>So the GDPR applies.

I never said it doesn't apply. I said how is the EU gonna prosecute an entity that doesn't reside in the EU?

Extraditions are tough to negotiate even for serious stuff like murder. No foreign judge will take GDPR violations seriously to do that.

Sorry for that, guess I'm just too used to the common misconception some people have that the GDPR doesn't apply if a company isn't established in the EU.

In this case 23andMe is on the Data Privacy Framework list, so they have volunteered to follow the GDPR while still being based in the US. This is basically the same as a number of other GDPR cases, including the GDPR fine against Clearview AI. Fining 23andMe if they violate GDPR should be trivial in that case.

EU will presumably stop you from doing business in the EU, if you break EU laws and ignore judgments. Companies don't want that. Grindr LLC, a US company with no EU corporate presence as far as I know, was fined 6.5 million for breaching GDPR by an Oslo Court, upheld in appeals. They paid that fine. If they didn't, they'd probably be kicked out of the app stores from Norway (if not from all of EU). Apple and Google do have an EU presence. Even if they didn't, they wouldn't start a war over 23andMe.

We generally don't need to worry about EU judgments against US companies being enforced, or vice versa. It doesn't get far enough that we need to think about how it's going to be enforced as a practical matter.

You really think they are getting access to their data and looking for some German dude’s data in every server they have? At most 23andMe gets some 250 item questionnaire that some poor soul with a red stapler in a basement has to answer, some middle manager puts a signature on it, sends it saying “yeah we good” and that’s it. Unless there is enough noise for someone to sue, no one is looking at that shit hard enough.

Even if they are, 6.5 million in fines is chump change.

Filling out some form won't help if someone finds out they're not doing what they said they will do. The data protection agencies will sue if they find that out. And they did find out that Grindr was selling data it wasn't allowed to.

Fines are scaled according to revenue. That's the reason for the monumental fines leveled at Google and Facebook. They don't mess around.

I believe Grindr's fine was just based on their revenue from Norwegian users. Probably plenty hurtful enough to make them implement data protection in the jurisdictions which demand it.

Fines are based on a number of things; the type of data (PII or Article-9-PII), number of people affected, amount of data, previous violations, and as far as I know also the country issuing the fine. 6.5M might be a small fine by some standards, but if fined and nothing improves the fine is likely to be a lot higher the next time around.

Meta has been fined €1.2b for breaching GDPR, though it seems to still be appealing.

The fine is revenue adjusted.

> EU's legal arm can't extent outside the boarders of the EU, without an outright military invasion

All the lawsuits from EU against tech companies outside the EU have been carried out without any military invasions required. You are delusional if you think USA is going to go “Google won’t pay the fines, invade us if you want the money”

>You are delusional if you think USA is going to go “Google won’t pay the fines, invade us if you want the money”

Why don't you read my comment thoroughly before accusing people of being delusional? Google is registered in Europe(HQ in Ireland IIRC ) and does business in Europe as an European company, so there's a physical, legal and tax paying entity the EU can fine and even European management they can send to jail just in case they don't comply, same how they did with VW for the diesel scandal.

If you would have read my comment thoroughly (hard ask, I know), you would have seen I'm specifically asking about how would the EU fine foreign companies that have EU citizens' data but have no HQ or any legal entity in Europe that can be reached by EU law enforcement in case of GDPR violations.