Re:Facebook now denying access unless EU users opt-in to tra...
by vidarh on Wednesday May 09, 2018 @01:13PM
(#17031633)
Maybe, but my experience with US companies is that surprisingly large companies sometimes think they'll get away with just doing stuff that's legal under US law and pretend the EU is just another US state.
E.g. I spent 3 years at Yahoo (more than a decade ago now) wrangling with US product managers that found it incredibly hard to accept that the "workarounds" they kept proposing for EU requirements for payments systems were highly illegal in the European countries we operated in, as a means to cut effort. My team existed pretty much only to form a protective layer between the US payments team and the European business because the European business didn't trust them to not pull a fast one to save time, because they didn't understand the seriousness of the requirements.
But in many European countries, the courts takes a very dim view on that kind of attitude.
E.g. I spent 3 years at Yahoo (more than a decade ago now) wrangling with US product managers that found it incredibly hard to accept that the "workarounds" they kept proposing for EU requirements for payments systems were highly illegal in the European countries we operated in, as a means to cut effort. My team existed pretty much only to form a protective layer between the US payments team and the European business because the European business didn't trust them to not pull a fast one to save time, because they didn't understand the seriousness of the requirements.
But in many European countries, the courts takes a very dim view on that kind of attitude.