In France we always had strong laws too (we basically adapted our super old laws for "files and info on paper" to "files and info on paper on a computer"), in decent part because Vichy.

Technically I could already ten years ago ask any company to show me every file they had on me, allow me to edit, and ask them to delete, and they had to comply. But the era on gigantic worldwide corp made this much harder to enforce, and thus much harder for user to enjoy their rights. I'm glad the EU moved forward on standardisation and enforcement at EU level.

No more "the data you refer to is in Ireland and owned by an Irish company that doesn't operate in France !" and crap like that.